Audient One-Timers: Smoke Signals

Welcome to the first in my 2026 monthly series in which I am rewatching my 12 favorite films, according to Flickchart, that I have seen only once.

So we start out this series with a very unassuming film to be among my 12 favorite movies of any kind, though I suppose the standard is a bit lower for what I'm calling "one-timers" -- films I've seen only once.

To call a film a "one-timer" implies that it is very difficult to sit through a second time, either for length (such as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) or for subject matter (such as Requiem for a Dream, which I have actually seen at least four times.) That's not the way I'm using it here. There's no judgment, it's just a literal fact: the 12 films in this series are the highest ranked on my Flickchart that I have seen only once. Yes some of them will be long and some will have difficult subject matter, but those are merely secondary factors in their inclusion in this series. (Though they may be primary factors in why I've seen the film only once.) 

And that 12th favorite, with a current ranking of #175, is Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, which I watched for the first time just about 13 years ago, give or take a few weeks. 

The film was significant for me in that year of 2013, which ended up being the year I moved to Australia, though I didn't know it at the time I watched Smoke Signals. Eyre's film was the first in a weekly series I wrote for the Flickchart blog called Flickchart Road Trip, which involved me watching a movie set in each of the 50 states, driving along an imaginary path that started from where I lived in Los Angeles at the time. I'd then "duel" that movie, just in the blog post, against five other movies from that state that were already in my Flickchart, seeing where it landed among them. 

It was a very harrowing commitment because I'm the guy who refuses to miss posting deadlines on a project like this, even if real-world reasons gave me a good excuse to do so. Such as moving to a new country and not having internet at my house for a few weeks, meaning I'd have to go to the library or a nearby hospital to do everything I needed for each post, as well as continuing to source one new movie per week to watch from each new state -- which was far less easy back in those largely pre-streaming days. I got to the end of the year with a sigh of relief and a vow to never do anything like that again.

The first stop on the road trip, geographically after California, was Arizona, where the second half of Smoke Signals is set. So that's the film I chose. (I had already decided that I wasn't going to start with California, but save it for #50 -- though I can't remember now if I "flew" to Alaska and Hawaii before or after California, so it might have been #48.) 

And I was floored by Eyre's movie. In fact, it kicked off two straight five-star movies to begin the series, as Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole would be up next in New Mexico. That movie might also be in this series because it's ranked high enough, but I've already seen that one a second time. After those two movies, the series never got close to reaching those heights again, but it was helpful in providing an immediate endorsement of this project I'd taken on. 

The thing I remembered most from the first viewing was how the ending absolutely socked me, leaving me in tears. You always remember the tears.

When I got to the ending this time, after the movie flew by (it's only 90 minutes), I could see the part that had made me cry, and I could feel some facisimile of the same emotions welling up maybe as a sense memory. But the ending of the movie is not really constructed as a big make-you-cry moment, so I feel like the tears may have been the result of an accumulation of subtle moments in the study of its two main characters. That speaks very well of the movie, its construction and its perfromances, but perhaps it made me a little less likely to cry this time around, and indeed I did not. 

Jeez, I haven't even really told you anything about the movie while already talking about its ending.

It's the story of two teenagers on an Idaho reservation, who are siblings by adoption and who we see at multiple ages through flashbacks. I'll list the actors who play them as the teenage versions, who are Adam Beach as Victor, the biological son of Arnold (Gary Farmer), and Evan Adams as Thomas, the adoptive son of Arnold after Arnold saved the baby from a house fire that killed Thomas' parents. Thomas naturally views his adoptive father as a hero, but there's more to this story and Arnold is a complicated man living with demons. He eventually leaves the reservation, abandoning the boys' mother Arlene (Tantoo Cardinal) to relocate to Phoenix, which happens before the start of the narrative. In fact, the narrative starts with a report of Gary's death in the lonely spot outside Phoenix where he was living in trailer and seems to have struck up a friendship with one younger woman, Suzy (Irene Bedard), but was otherwise living alone with those demons. Victor and Thomas need to road trip to Phoenix to take care of Gary's affairs, such as they are, and make peace with the memory of this absent father, whom they each see differently.

There isn't much more to the story on a plot level, but there's much more on the level of character and emotion. Still, watching the movie, you are struck by the intentional smallness of its scale. I should say, I was struck by it on this viewing, especially since I knew how highly I regarded the film. 

The relationship between Thomas and Victor is fertile. Thomas is a bit of a dork, a bespectacled kid who is given to great storytelling skills but is not cool in any respect that would be rewarded socially. Victor much more fits that profile as he's more traditionally handsome and is the star of the basketball team. However it's Thomas who is more at peace with his place in the world and it appears that Victor may be wrestling with the start of some of his father's demons. 

If I were to forcibly re-rank Smoke Signals on Flickchart -- which I am not going to do, even though that might be a logical accompanying action for this blog series -- it might fall a little bit. It would certainly end up outside my top 200. Instead, it will only slowly drop over time as it loses duels to certain films that are currently ranked in the next 100 spots behind it.

But that's not the same as saying I regret the ranking. The effect the movie had on me this time might only be 80% of what it was the first time, but it reminded me specifically of the value of a movie like this, which underplays most of its emotions in getting you to a very emotional spot by the end. I also really loved the look inside an American community that we don't see enough of on film. This week in particular, watching the film made it a good companion with the film I watched on Monday for Australia Day, Bran Nue Dae, since there's obviously a lot of overlap between the experience of indigenous Australians and indigenous Americans, particularly in terms of things like the way alcohol impacts their communities.

And to think, the first time I saw Smoke Signals, I wouldn't have even made that connection as I was still seven months away from moving to Australia. 

Remembering Rob Reiner: The Magic of Belle Isle

This is the first in intertwining 2026 bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different focuses. Starting bi-monthly in January, I'll be watching the six Rob Reiner films I haven't previously seen. The other bi-monthly slot, starting in February, will focus on revisiting six of my Reiner favorites.

Focusing on previously unseen films by Rob Reiner that he directed entirely after 2012 always promised to be rough at times. But at least we've started off with a film that is merely innocuous.

From what I remember of Flipped, The Magic of Belle Isle is probably most similar in Reiner's filmography to that 2010 film, in that both films feature a young girl as their protagonist, and both are set in a summery setting that prompts a nostalgia in viewers for simpler times, even if they never actually experienced that setting or those simpler times in their own lives. Both films also feature the young actress Madeline Carroll -- or, she was young then -- even though in only two years she's aged out of being the protagonist to being the protagonist's older sister. 

Knowing what I now know about Reiner's family, I wonder if these movies weren't both made as love letters to his (biological) daughter Romy, who would have been 13 and 15 at the time those two movies were released. 

The protagonist, Finnegan, is played by newcomer Emma Fuhrmann, and I list her as a newcomer because the film gives her the "and introducing" credit at the beginning. She didn't ultimately stick, not having a credit on IMDB in the last five years, but she did appear in the Adam Sandler movie Blended and in Avengers: Endgame, so there was a little juice there for a while -- and she gives a really good performance here.

But don't get side-tracked, Vance, because this is the plot synopsis portion of this post. 

I'd say she's really the co-protagonist, because the movie's biggest name is Morgan Freeman, who plays Finnegan's cantankerous neighbor in the titular lakeside town in some unspecified location of what I would guess is the Atlantic coast. (The interwebs tell me it was filmed in Greenwood Lake, New York. But I here I am getting sidetracked again.) He's only temporarily housesitting for a rock musician on tour, looking after the dog and trying to drink his way into an early grave. He's in a wheelchair and is a writer who no longer writes due to sorrow over the loss of his wife, some six years in the past. 

Like many cantankerous neighbors in the movies, Freeman's Monte Wildhorn has something to teach young Finnegan, who wants to become a writer, and she has something to teach him about not giving up on life. The lesson sharing is also going to hit Finnegan's mother, played by Viriginia Madsen, who is currently divorcing Finnegan's absentee dad, and who gives Monte a figure on whom to have a chaste crush that is chastely reciprocated. (In other words, this movie is not actually going to give Morgan Freeman and Viriginia Madsen a romantic relationship, not a huge shock since they're separated in age by nearly a quarter century. Interestingly, though, I'm currently looking at a British poster for the movie in which it is called Once More, and the poster certainly seems to suggest more of a relationship movie than the American poster above. Sidetrack much?)

Just from this basic setup, you can probably tell that this is a pretty mid concept for a movie and that you've seen a hundred such "heartwarming" tales if you've seen one. The fact that it was made by Reiner means that it is competent and likeable enough, even if it is entirely lacking in what you would call originality. 

Indeed, it's possible to map out every single step of this script, a collaboration between Reiner, Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman. You know the early scenes where Freeman is in full-on cantankerous mode are going to be played for comedy, though Freeman's nephew, played by Kenan Thompson, is actually the straight man here, at least in the scenes where Monte is moving into the house. After Thompson goes back from whence he came, then the comedy comes in the form of interactions with the neighbors and the dog, all of which are grumpy, but in that superficial movie way that is obviously going to melt away the moment Monte is required to do the right thing.

Because the movie is so basic from a screenplay level and in terms of any compelling reason for its existence, I don't think I need to go on at length about it. Then again, there are a lot of movies that we find pass the time well enough even though they do not need to exist, and for me, The Magic of Belle Isle was one of those. It was the perfect sort of movie to watch in the morning, which I did this past weekend on Sunday. 

If I'm looking for hallmarks of the Reiner signature, which I probably should be doing in a series like this, I'm not finding them in terms of the movie being funny, unfortunately. It's pleasant, and Freeman has and delivers some good lines of dialogue, but actually funny in the way Reiner's earlier films are funny? Not really, though I suspect that wasn't at the forefront of his thoughts considering that he was seeing his daughter earnestly in the role played by Fuhrmann. When that kind of thing is close to your heart, you aren't thinking about great comedy set pieces.

Still, the supporting cast is a really nice group with which to spend this time, as it also includes our dearly departed treasure Fred Willard, and Kevin Pollack in one scene. 

The movie is trying to bite off a little more than it can chew, as it's not enough for Monte to have a special relationship with Finnegan. He's also got to have a special relationship with the mentally challenged son of another neighbor, that neighbor being played by Jessica Hecht of Friends fame. Because Monte's primary energies are directed on Finnegan, that plot ends up feeling just about as superfluous as it certainly is from a narrative perspective. It's almost as though Reiner just wanted to make sure there was no chance we'd see Monte as an actual misanthrope.

If looking for Reiner connections, we should also note that Freeman had worked with him previously on The Bucket List. 

If I'm going chronologically, which at this point I will assume I am, next up in March will be probably the most difficult to watch of these previously unseen films, the 2015 film Being Charlie, which Reiner wrote with the son who went on to murder him. 

Sorry to end on such a cheery note. 

The realities of modern movie consumption

I probably don't need to write a lot about the screen shot I took when I was on our Australian streaming service Stan on Monday night, because it's pretty self-eplanatory. I was looking for something that -- yes -- did not require very much of my proactive mental engagement or my stamina, considering that it was actually my fourth movie of the day and I was starting it after 10 p.m. (Don't worry, I also got to the beach and went into the pool with my son, as well as made a mix and wrote a blog post. So it was a very productive day despite also featuring four movies.) And even though I selected only the 82-minute New Zealand film The Breaker Upperers, which I'd already seen and really liked, I did not make it through and still needed to finish it yesterday. 

But I didn't go specifically looking for such movies. This category presented itself to me within Stan's comedy section without me having to do anything.

It did make me wonder which movies they saw it fit not to include in this category. I'd like to know what their idea is of a sophisticated, requires-all-your-mental-acuity comedy. I suppose if Stan carried the Knives Out movies, and classified them as comedies, they might qualify.

As it was, the movies I saw while scanning were very similar to those in the categories "classic comedies," "frat pack comedies" and the humorously broad "funny films" -- which you'd hope would encompass any film in the comedy section. They did have a number of more useful categories like "indie comedies," "dark comedies," "rom-coms" and "bloody funny," that last being horror comedies. 

Even though I am, of course, disdainful of the idea of a movie you can watch while being on your phone throughout, I have to admit that I am not always avoiding the temptation to be on my phone during all the movies I watch. One movie I watched on Monday, I watched during the morning time slot, and I think being on my phone for part of it was an indication of my guilt and my sense that I should be doing something else at that time of the day. 

A brand new kind of Australia Day movie

This was the first Australia Day where I had to go digging for a title that was not already on my radar. 

Does that mean I've exhausted the available documents of European Australian settlers treating indigenous Australians horribly?

Surely not, but the movies I watched on January 26th the past four years -- Walkabout, High Ground, Charlie's Country and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith -- did represent the four movies I already had in my mind that profiled this way, that I had not already seen.

I don't watch Australian movies about those European settlers on Australia Day. Some Australians, or people who live in Australia anyway, surely would. But not me.

Ever since I started to really understand that many indigenous Australians think of this as Invasion Day, and call it that publicly, I relegated the mid-summer holiday to that place in mind of "it's quite problematic, but I do get a day off work at least." In fact, it's so problematic that you don't have to take that day off if you don't want to. The government has made it so you can work it and take a different day off in its place. 

My own contribution to pushing back against a certain subsection of gross white Australians, with whom I don't want to be associated, is to watch a movie on January 26th, for the fifth year in a row now, that considers the troubled plight of indigenous people in modern Australian history. 

Or, sometimes, not quite so troubled.

Oh, there's still an undercurrent of racism in Bran Nue Dae, Rachel Perkins' 2009 film that I knew, from the poster on Stan, was not going to sink me into a pit of despair, as some of those other films have. How could there not be. To depict the indigenous experience on film is to depict the experience of racism.

But it's also an extremely fun and silly road trip movie, and it's a musical!

When I say Bran Nue Dae was not on my radar, I should clarify that. I had heard the title, had probably seen it on my streamers -- particularly Stan, the Australian one -- multiple times before. But I spared it no more than a passing thought any time I'd seen it, and could not even have told you, for sure, that it was about indigenous Australians. Without having really analyzed whatever faces were on the poster, I might have thought it was African, since that creative spelling of "Brand New Day" is just as likely to be from there or somewhere else as from here. (Of course, if I'd analyzed it a little more closely and seen Geoffrey Rush on the poster, that would have cleared up any doubts.)

I've subsequently learned that the concept originated on stage in 1990, before being adapted to film two decades later. The songs are not particularly memorable, but some do get your toe tapping, and they more than exceed the minimum necessary for this to be a really fun experience.

The story is about an indigenous boy of about 16 (Willie, played by Rocky McKenzie) who lives in Broome, in the northwest part of the country, in 1969. Rocky has eyes for Rosie, played by Australian pop singer and national treasure Jessica Mauboy. However, she's being courted by a white Australian, Lester (Dan Sultan), who appeals to Rosie primarily because he can give her her big break to sing and potentially get noticed at the local roadhouse.

Willie is torn away from the potential romance when his mother sends him off to a Catholic mission in Perth, in the southwest of the country, where he's going to study to become a priest. That mission is overseen by the aforementioned Geoffrey Rush. A couple of the boys break into the refrigerator to steal Cokes and Cherry Ripes -- a local delicacy in the confection aisle at the supermarket -- and Willie is the only one who comes forward to admit he was part of the group, to save an innocent boy from being punished. When Rush punishes him severely and begins to insult him -- "I should have known one your Aborigine kind would be worth nothing," he says -- Willie escapes on foot and starts to make his way back home, on an adventure that will have lots of twists and turns and feature lots of compelling characters.

Among these are a drunken Aboriginal elder, "Uncle Tadpole" (Ernie Dingo), who originally just wants Willie's money to buy drink before softening and trying to get him back to Broome. Then there's the pair of hippies in their VW van, whom Uncle Tadpole pretends to have been hit by in order to guilt them into driving the pair to Broome. Just when you think it's the sort of story where Willie will just get passed from one pair of hands to the next -- some of them more well meaning than others -- the same group of characters are hard to fully get rid of, as they continue together on this road trip, accumulating a character played by another Australian acting treasure, Deborah Mailman, along the way. The whole time, Rush's priest is in hot pursuit, following just a few hours behind them at all their stops.

It's hard to describe how much fun and joy Bran Nue Dae packs into scarcely 85 minutes -- really only around 78 when the credits start rolling. This is also, remember, a musical, and though few of the songs are longer than about 90 seconds, it's not easy to fit all that in without shortchanging us somewhere. But no, this is just an economic package of good vibes, silliness, and yes, a few moments of more profound contemplation about the treatment of indigenous people in this society. 

Bran Nue Dae does not need to dwell on this last, though. Even with giving Rush the above line of reprehensible dialogue, the film is not all that eager to make him a one-dimensional villain, and it ends in quite a nice place for his character. 

But these things are still clearly on the film's mind. The cheeky song that follows that line of dialogue by Rush contains the lyric

"There's nothing I would rather be
Than to be an Aborigine
And watch you take my precious land away."

It's said with a song and a dance and a smile on everybody's face, maybe so that white Australians in the audience won't feel too bad about being complicit with that. But it needles them nonetheless. It's a little bit of secret protest thrown in within the context of a cheery musical, which maybe just makes it all the more subversive.

Nor does the film shy away from the sad realities of the indigenous Australian experience, even if their bite is lessened by coming within the context of a comedy. The two significant indigenous elders who appear in this film -- those played by Dingo and Mailman -- are both portrayed as alcoholics. Alcohol has ravaged the Australian indigenous communities, such that some heavily indigenous areas are entirely dry as an attempt to lessen the deleterious effects of the drug. 

One thing personally that I really enjoyed about watching this movie was that it contains a scene set in the same iconic movie theater that I visited when I was in Broome in 2023. You may recall from this post that my younger son, my sister-in-law and I attended Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem when we were there on vacation. I was enthralled by this open-air theater, and seeing it in Bran Nue Dae really brought up positive memories of that trip. The movie the characters are watching in "the world's oldest picture gardens" is interrupted by a torrential rain, which is a very real risk you don't get in a lot of other cinemas, and part of the charm I found in the place. 

Bran Nue Dae ends on a very silly note that relies on highly coincidental connections between a bunch of characters who had just met each other randomly, which is a moment that places the film squarely within the realm of fantasy. Though it's an optimistic sort of fantasy that speaks volumes about the filmmakers' hope that this can, one day, really just be one happy country, where people recognize, acknowledge and embrace the ways that they are more similar than they are different. 

That the film is set in 1969, and that we haven't nearly gotten there yet, is a bit more sobering. 

The spoiler that made Together my first Australian #1

Here we are on my final post that puts a bow on 2025 by taking a deeper dive into my #1 and how it came to reach that height. Some years my #1 inspires me to write about a larger, related topic that delves into my ranking history, but this year, the movie itself contains a ton of things I still want to write about. So I'll use this space to do so.

Up front, though: Because I mentioned spoilers in the subject of this post, I should tell you that I won't be properly spoiling Together until the fourth of these four segments. Things get progressively more spoiler-y through the segments, so if you haven't seen the movie and you sense yourself starting to get exposed to things you don't want to be exposed to, you can bow out then. 

My first Australian #1

Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year. 

You wouldn't know Michael Shanks' Together was Australian on the surface of it. The stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco, are both American, and though the film never specifies its location, everyone else in the movie speaks with an American accent. The only real settings are an urban area (for a very short time at the beginning) and a rural area (for the rest of the movie).

But the keen observer will note Australian actor Damon Herriman as essentially the only other prominent actor in the cast. While him being Australian does not, of course, limit him to appearing in Australian movies -- Herriman was also Charles Manson in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- it does make you wonder if, indeed, it might have been shot in his home country.

Well Shanks is also Australian, and I would assume most of the crew are as well, because it doesn't make sense to import Americans to do jobs Australians can do perfectly well. So it's also shot here, and I discovered recently that one of the producers is a neighbor of mine in the town where I live, and also friends on Facebook with some of my friends. (Hi Mike Cowap, if you're reading this. I don't know you but I hope to meet you sometime soon.)

Needless to say, I've never had an Australian #1 before. While this movie is not "Australian" in the sense of being set in Australia within its own world, it's a full-on Australian production, and that definintely counts. 

Because I've got a lot of other things to write about here, I won't go through and figure out how high an Australian movie has gotten previously in my rankings, but another one that was produced here but set in America -- the aforementioned Elvis -- did make my top ten a few years ago. In terms of movies actually set in Australia, Sweet Country was a top 20 movie for me in 2017. 

Does this mean I'm finally embracing the country that has been my home for going on 13 years now? That wouldn't really be an accurate conclusion. I mean, the fact that this movie hails from Australia is very much extra-textual to the movie. But I do appreciate the symbolic value of it, and hopefully my next Australian #1 will even take place here. 

Dave Franco equals his big brother

James Franco has fallen on hard times, to put it mildly, but he'll always have a place in my personal cinematic history in that he was the star of one of my past #1 movies, 2010's 127 Hours. That means I've got his name in a spreadsheet where I track people to see if they might eventually appear in more than one. 

Fifteen years later, Dave Franco has now achieved the same thing. Barring a big comeback from James that might only result from a very sincere apology tour, Dave seems like the only one who will have the chance to ever appear in another.

I don't specifically have a lot to say about this, but I did think it was worth making a quick mention in a post where I am touting Together's feats.

Body dysmorphia goes back-to-back

I don't know if you remember when I wrote this post last year after naming The Substance my #1 of 2024, but the premise of that post was that a horror movie had gone back-to-back with my #1 of 2023, Skinamarink, which was quite a surprise since I had never previously named a horror movie as my #1. I then went on to try to explore if The Substance was "really" a horror movie or if it was just body horror. Yes I considered that distinction pretty carefully. 

Well now, in the space of just a little more than two years, if you count January of 2024 and January of 2026 as bracketing that period, horror has gone from a #1 underdog to a #1 favorite. This is the third straight year you could describe my #1 as horror. I mean, Together is more definitely a horror than The Substance.

But even more so, it is a body horror, and even more so, it is a body horror in which body dysmorphia is a prominent theme. 

Some of the discussions of the body dysmorphia get into my next section where the real spoilers start, so let me get into the other similarities I noticed with The Substance that suggest I am definitely predisposed to this sort of movie:

1) Both movies have essentially three actors, with all other parts barely even being speaking roles.

2) In both movies, there is a central dynamic between two characters, and a third supporting character who acts on them as a catalyst. 

3) In both movies, those two characters are concerned about things that are happening physically to their bodies. 

4) Both movies feature some sort of physical monstrosity, but that's all I'll say about that at the moment. 

Let's stop dancing around it and go on to the next and final section ...

The final shot of Together that blew my mind

SPOILER ALERT.

So when anyone asks me why this seemingly ordinary horror movie became my #1 of the year, and they don't care about having it spoiled, the experience I'm about to recount with the movie is what I'll point them to. Hello, you, if you are reading now and this describes you. 

So just to clearly establish where we are in the story ... 

Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco), who have been dating for years and living in the city, move to the country so she can take up a teaching job. His attempts to succeed as a musician have basically failed, and he's belatedly accepted her proposal, made in front of all their friends, to live together? get married? it's not entirely clear. What's clear is he did initially botch the acceptance of the proposal, leading to considerable awkwardness in the moment. Obviously there's something about taking his relationship with Millie any further that is scaring him. 

After moving to the country, Tim and Millie are on a hike and they fall into a hole in the ground where they come into contact with a mysterious force that causes their bodies to start to fuse together. We already know this force is pretty dangerous as we see what happened to two dogs who drank the same water that Tim and Millie drank. We also know there are some other hikers who were reported missing in this area. We'll meet them later.

Tim has shown commitment jitters the whole time, and won't have sex with Millie, which makes her somewhat more receptive to the friendliness/flitrations of a senior teacher at the school, Jamie (Herriman), who we later learn is gay so Tim actually didn't have anything to worry about. But Tim gets jealous anyway. 

The worse problem, though, is the steady attempts of their biology to fuse together, which once happens while they're having sex, and other times when they're sleeping. It gets so bad that their bodies are literally pulled together as if by unseen forces. The force is so powerful that it sends them into a bit of a trance, leading to a memorable scene of Tim in the shower and Millie against a frosted glass door. 

Eventually it seems like one of them will have to sacrifice themselves to save the other. They both try to do it, which is a touching indication of how much they actually do love each other. But then, to prevent Millie from dying of what should be a fatal knife wound, Tim decides to just let their bodies merge. This is accompanied by the great needle drop of "2 Become 1" by the Spice Girls, which we earlier learned was Millie's favorite band. Yes, this movie has a sense of humor, and we start to see the bodies fuse beyond the point of no return. We already saw this happen earlier with the hikers, so we know it doesn't end well. 

What seems like it will just be a button is Millie's parents later arriving at the house for a Sunday lunch, one she's mentioned twice previously in the narrative. I think we're meant to assume it's the first time they've been to the couple's new country home. After they've rung the bell, we're bracing ourselves for what deformed freak is going to answer the door. After all, we saw both the dogs and the hikers that previously fused together into an unspeakable monstrosity.

The person who answers the door is:

A non-binary person, who says to their parents, casually, "Hey."

Roll credits. 

This is not Alison Brie. This is not Dave Franco. This is a different actor, and a different person entirely. 

Suddenly I realized that this movie was operating as an allegory for coming out as a trans person. 

And then I started to backtrack.

If I rewound 30 seconds -- in my mind only, since I saw this in the theater -- I realized that when Millie's parents got out of the car, they looked a little nervous but cautiously optimistic. It was not a look they'd have on their faces just from visiting their daughter's new home for the first time. It might be a look they'd have if they had been quarreling with her and this was an olive branch by both parties, but that's not something that was mentoned in the narrative. 

No, this is a look the parents would have if they were meeting their daughter for the first time after the daughter had come out either as non-binary or as a trans man. 

And this is what probably got me about that: One of my big emotional triggers is when a parent accepts their gay, trans or non-binary child. I can't explain exactly why this is an emotional trigger for me, because I don't have anyone in my family who can be described that way. But maybe it's just that as a parent, I hope I would do the same thing in their position, even if I were scared and even if I didn't fully understand. I would hope I would just love them unconditionally.

And it's unconditional love we see on the faces of Millie's parents, mixed in with their nervousness and cautious optimism.

So then I rewound a little further and remembered a line of dialogue earlier that told us what we were supposed to think about this visit by Millie's parents. It's the second time she mentioned it. In an argument with Tim, she said, "My parents are coming for lunch this weekend, and I don't think you should be here for that."

In other words, this alternate version of her should not be there. She was doubting she was ready to come out to them yet. 

We know she did eventually change her mind, and maybe "she" became a "they" when "two became one." Otherwise, Millie's parents would not have that look of nervousness and cautious optimism on their faces as they approached the house, ready to meet their daughter as a trans man or a non-binary person for the first time. 

On my second viewing, I couldn't map out everything perfectly. There's a subplot about Tim's recently deceased parents that seems like a red herring in terms of this interpretation of the movie. Unless ... unless you see this as a projection of the fact that Millie's parents might be "dead to her," in a sense, if they do not accept her new publicly presented identity. 

But I think that's because Together doesn't want this to be the only interpretation of the movie. On Filmspotting when talking about Weapons, Josh Larsen recently said that a school shooting metaphor was an "available" interpretation of the movie. I think Shanks and company also wanted the trans allegory to be an "available" interpretation of their movie, not the only one -- but with plenty of Easter eggs for those wanting to follow that interpretation to its logical ends. Such as:

1) There's a scene earlier in the film when a slightly possessed Tim, who is basically becoming sickened by his compulsion to be near Millie, arrives at her school to finally have sex with her. They run into a nearby available bathroom to do this, but of course, this is a school bathroom used by students, and we see a pair of young feet appear outside the cubicle, wondering what's going on inside there. When Millie emerges by herself, leaving Tim to remain hiding, we realize that this is a boys bathroom, and the senior teacher, Jamie, says to her, trying to put her transgression in context, "Miss Wilson, this is a bathroom for little boys." On the surface, yes, this is a problem because it suggests an inappropriate relationship between an adult and a child. But if you are already looking at this as a trans allegory, it's a moment of shame for Millie because she is trying to use a different bathroom from her biological gender assignment. 

2) Then there's Jamie. Is it a coincidence that Jamie has a name that could belong equally well to a man or a woman? I think it isn't. Part of the character's function in the story can be interpreted as trying to draw Millie out and show her it's okay to come out as trans. We are very much meant to believe this is a journey Jamie already went through, which is hidden within a plot about the cult that used to operate out of the cave where Tim and Millie drank that poisonous water.

3) In this allegory, Millie is the "real" character and Tim is an embodiment of the potential future version of herself. She's trying to get Tim to "commit" to being the forward-facing personality, and Tim's refusal to do so is the thing that saddens her so much. But it's really Millie who can't commit, and Tim is just the symbol of her struggle. Although Tim is not portrayed effeminately in any clear way -- remember, this is a Trojan horse interpretation built into this otherwise mainstream movie -- some of his costume choices and hairstyle choices read as androgynous, if you are looking for this. 

4) When both Tim and Millie try to save each other at the end, it could be interpreted as the character's flirtation with suicide. We know that a person with this sort of body dysmorphia, who does not believe they can come out as another gender becaue of how their loved ones will react, often considers suicide. So the decision to finally come out is akin to the choice not to go through with the suicide. So in a way, the new half of the personality has saved the original one from extinction. The character's journey is to realize that selecting to present yourself as a different gender, or no gender at all, does not mean that the world will view you as an unspeakable monstrosity. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. 

If you've seen the movie, and you either didn't see this, or saw it but didn't think it worked, or saw it and thought it worked within the context of the movie but you don't care about this as a mission for a movie, that's fine. You do you. I'll just say that for me, this was a revelatory way of sneaking in a hidden intepretation of a movie that doesn't demand to be dealt with, but is "available" if you want it.

It doesn't even matter that the hidden interpretation was about a trans person considering coming out. I know that could make it divisive to some viewers. What matters, to me, is that it's got a hidden interpretation at all. The fact that this hidden interpretation also has a socially forward function that I embrace, and that this can therefore be seen as an extremely happy ending, just makes it all the better in terms of my appreciation. 

And you know what? Maybe it isn't even the only hidden interpretation in Together. It's just the only one I happened to excavate. 

Movies that operate on multiple levels, with multiple available interpretations to different viewers, are always the best uses of the unique tool that is cinema. 

The fact that I didn't even realize it was doing it until the very final shot?

Well for me, that's something worth celebrating by making it my #1 of the year.

2025 in portmanteaus

Mashups of the titles of two movies released in 2025, to create a crazy new movie? Don't mind if I do! (For the 12th year in a row!)

Monkey 17 - When you wind up Robert Pattinson and he beats out a tune on his drum, it automatically kills one of his clones. 

One Battle After Another Simple Favor - A gun-toting revolutionary has a kinky thing for twincest with Blake Lively.  

The Wolf Man in Cabin 10 - The guests on a billionaire's yacht get a huge surprise when the journalist writing a story about him turns into a werewolf. 

Predator: F Marry Kill - I'd fuck the predator, marry the android and kill the xenomorph. 

F1 Marry Kill - I'd fuck Brad Pitt, marry Brad Pitt and kill Brad Pitt. 

Zoogonia 2 - They finally grudgingly accept all the animals, but accepting aliens is just a bridge too far. 

Captain America: Jurassic World - Sam Wilson grows a Red Hulk Harrison Ford, large enough to fight off some pesky dinosaurs. 

It Was Rust an Accident - A group of Irani former political prisoners kidnap Alec Baldwin because they believe he was the one who shot that cinematographer in the chest. 

Himnet - Shakespeare's son survives getting bubonic plague and grows up to become a bio-enhanced football player. 

28 Years Laterialists - Humans are so comfortable in the post-zombie era that they've gone back to judging potential suitors by their height and net worth. 

Ballerinonnas - Four Italian grandmothers find themselves cooking meals and shooting assassins at point blank range in the John Wick Universe. 

I Snow White You Did Last Summer - A villain origin story in which we learn Snow White was actually the bad one, and used a hook to eliminate her competition for the title "fairest of all."

I Know What You Did Last Submersible Disaster - The answer is: nothing. They did nothing. 

After the KPop Demon Hunt - The singers in HuntrX accuse the singers in Saja Boys of making them their little soda pop without the girls' permission. 

Wicked: For Good Boy - Who knew the conclusion of this story would be Toto fighting off an evil force in a house in the woods?

If I Had Legs I'd Kick Your Dragon - Actually, kicking the dragon was what led to the loss of the legs. 

Avatar: Fire and Smashing Machine - An MMA fighter develops a powerful drug habit while recovering from his cage match against Colonel Quaritch in the body of a Na'vi. 

Hurry Up Dead Man - After grilling all the suspects, Benoit Blanc reveals this twist: The Weeknd was killed by his own massive ego. 

The Frankenstein Four: First Steps - Who wins in a fight, Thing or Frankenstein's Monster? 

Anakinda Pregnant - A large snake's faked pregnancy is actually just Jack Black bulging out of its stomach. 

Spinal Destination: Bloodlines - David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls finally succumb to the persistent embodiment of death that has gotten all their previous drummers. 

Mission: Impossible - The Final Destination - Ethan Hunt could climb the Burj Khalifa, but he's no match for your average, run-of-the-mill revolving restaurant. 

Heddas of State - A conniving socialite makes her most mischievous dreams come true when she becomes both the president of the United States and the UK prime minister. 

Togeternity - Dave Franco and Alison Brie didn't realize their bodies were going to be fused together in the afterlife as well. 

Jay Kellio - George Clooney has even more regrets about how he spent his time on Earth when he's beamed into outer space and no longer on Earth. 

The Alto Knights at Freddy's - Duelling Robert DeNiro's fight a bunch of animatronic robots at a mobster themed restaurant. 

The Freakier Friday Murder Club - Not only must Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie solve murders, they must do it while switched into the bodies of their grandchildren. 

The Housemaid of Dynamite - No one knows who fired Sydney Sweeney at a rich family in the suburbs, but clearly they intended to inflict the maximum possible damage. 

Death of a Unicornfield - A murderous clown gets the tables turned on him when he's speared through the chest by a mythological creature. 

Eddington in Peru - The local sheriff and the local mayor have a violent disagreement about whether a bear can take off his mask while eating marmalade. 

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?