2025 Retrospective: The Cinema

Mwaaah the cinema! It gets knocked down, but it gets up again. They’re never going to keep it down, though not for lack of trying. Did I see a lot of good movies this year? Yes. Were many of them new release American movies? No.

Biggest Ws

2025 had some sick-as-fuck action-adventure movies. The new Count of Monte Cristo movie out of France was hilarious. The Count wears the most improbably-rubber masks you could imagine in 1820-whenever and he lives in an orientalism-themed Gaylord hotel. Great stuff for a movie when we’re defining a movie as “images playing before my eyes in a sequence to make me go ‘ooh hoo hoo yessss hee hee’ for three hours straight”. Godzilla Minus One also rocked up before my eyes this year, and not only was Godzilla huge and awesome but its depiction of post-war Japan and the mental health struggles of traumatized soldiers realizing they fought an unjust conflict which made them disposable pawns of an uncaring state was poignant. This year we also had Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. I watched Den of Thieves 1 ironically, but after Pantera my engagement with the series is completely ronic. If Gerard Butler and Ice Cube’s Son don’t get married in Den of Thieves 3, I’m going full Sherlock Fan crazy.

I watched Serious Movies this year too. Is The People’s Joker a Serious Movie? To me it is. If you get where you’re going by being insane, then you went the right way. Speaking of insane, I watched Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part adaptation of War & Peace. It’s ecstatic, a work of absolute cinematic bravura. I was going nuts in the stands for every single camera movement. Speaking of the horrors of war, our heroes over at PBS brought me Aurora’s Sunrise, a wrenching film about the Armenian genocide and the manner in which surviving atrocity can itself be a burden. This film makes humble but powerful use of the medium of animation to allow us less intrusive access to the darkest moments of a woman’s life. The distance of the animated scenes prevents the slide into hysterics or prurience often created by live-action reenactment.

Many movies I rush out and tell people about, but some are just for me. Would anyone else want to watch Lightning Over Braddock, a movie about the Rust Belt and the cinema and annoying people in your town and the hard part about doing things in a way nobody has done them before? Tony Buba is an icon to me for being wholly his own kind of guy, which is not a kind of guy which makes sense to anyone else or, at times, himself. There’s a musical number inside the defunct blast furnace, but then you can see that in almost any Rust Belt town if you know where to look.

Lastly, this year I rewatched the Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death. This is one of the first movies I remember watching during my undergraduate studies that made me think “Yes, I need to keep doing this so I can keep finding out about real cinema!” What a relief to see again a film important to me in years past and have it still be wonderful. It is one of those foolish, bewildering, fantastical, lovable, romantic old-time movies. It also speaks to the terrible nature of war, the second World War in particular. Let the color and the design and the heart catch you, before we run out of time!

Biggest Ls

Speaking of the Archers, I didn’t care for Black Narcissus. It looked good, but I couldn’t lock in with the story or the character, even though I’d love to be a nun who is insane. The whole thing felt terribly silly and lacking in the incisive observations about British imperial hubris I associate with other Archers movies. An unpleasantly hairy guy in a pith helmet just kept saying stuff like “That wind’ll drive you batty.” And it did.

I wrote on this in one of my quarterly updates, so I’ll keep it short: Rogue One isn’t a good movie. While A Matter of Life and Death proved even better than my memories, Rogue One bottomed out far short of the finish line. It turned out to be a haphazard, messy movie which trades more heavily on its franchise connection than I remembered. But at least Two-Tubes is there!

I watched Cameron Crowe’s Singles. It sucked. I watched Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles. It sucked. Both films came off as self-congratulatory mediocrity centered on some dad-age dude’s extremely bore-core hobbyhorse. What a pair of BoomerX sentiment-sinks. I think I don’t need movies made by white American guys born between 1955 and 1965. They’re not shit to me.

Sam Raimi and the Coen brothers can stay, but they’re on thin ice.

Hot Takes

This is actually a really cold take, but the author of the film White House Down was not qualified to make a movie about the Holocaust: Nuremberg was bad. No one should ever come out of a Holocaust movie and say “Weirdly it reminded me of a Marvel movie?” And yet I was not the only person to say this, not just on Letterboxd, but in my screening.

Guillermo del Toro desperately needs to have a new idea. He’s made so many movies about “What if the monster were good, and man were the real monster!?” You don’t say? You didn’t manage to say it enough in Shape of Water, Hellboy 1 & 2, Pinocchio, and presumably Nightmare Alley combined? Guillermo, for the love of Todd, ask the next question. I don’t care which one it is. I’ll take any of them at this point. I watched two del Toro movies this year, and Blade 2 was the more engaging, if not the more “good”.

Allow me to advocate now for a film which isn’t good but is engaging: I believe Tim Thomerson delivers an unironically brilliant performance in Trancers. Jack Deth is inexplicably a coherent character whose exploits are convincing. He holds the film together despite every other aspect of production being utterly incompetent. Watching Thomerson as Deth onscreen, I believe in the man even though I don’t believe in the time-traveling bounty hunters of post-apocalyptic “Lost Angeles”.

I will show us out with a tip of the hat to the world’s premiere icon of stage and screen: William Shatner. Every aspiring documentary filmmaker should watch William Shatner’s The Captains, not because it is a good documentary but because it is an entirely unbelievable object. You will not believe how Shatner embarrasses himself here. You will not believe how rude he is to Kate Mulgrew. You will not believe how high out of his mind Avery Brooks is. You will not believe how kind Sir Patrick Stewart is to a much lesser actor. You will not believe that Shatner was the man with final say on the film because it is so grotesquely unflattering. And yet it provokes in me a deeper love for the man due to the overwhelming scale of his foibles. This is how you craft a revealing portrait of a man, accidentally.

What can we say about 2025 as a year in cinema? Nothing, because I didn’t see that many new release movies. What can we say about 2025 as my year in cinema? 2025 was a year for sickos. The sicko was me. 

Not that alone, though. The cinema, at its best, opened a secret passage to a hidden world and let me poke my head through. There is a world where we forgive William Shatner for his enormous vanity. There is a world where the most NAFTA-riven Rust Belt town stands beautiful and mysterious. There is a world where we continue to live and survive, even after the Battle of Austerlitz and the Sack of Moscow.

Bro, it’s this world. Always has been. We’re already here. 

Thanks, The Cinema, for reminding me.