loved this in 2025
a short and incomplete list of a few things I loved in 2025—media-wise.
The Year of Joan Hackett
Completing Joan Hackett’s filmography was a lovely 2025 journey. She gave such warmth onscreen and throughout the year, I felt so stabilized every time I returned to her fold to check off another film. You can read the complete journey here.
Cutthroat Island (1995)
I cannot believe you all let this fail at the box office! Geena Davis, a tall lady pirate. I'll let that sink in because it's really all you need.
She really threw herself full-body into this role and it is a delight. No daintiness to be seen. It's all full-fisted punches to the faces (theirs and hers) and scrambling over rocks and cliffs and ships and smashing through walls and shaking it off (ala Daniel Craig running through drywall in Casino Royale).
She is very cool and hot and tall, and our pirate king.
Sea battles! So much boat! So much real boat!
Movies like this, you see the craftspeople's work! You see the skills! You see the magic! Oh, what we have lost! Streamers and AI don't understand how much the children long for real boat!
Josh O’Connor Autumn
Josh O’Connor had four cinema releases in the fall of 2025 and I went to see every one in cinema. Unfortunately, the final film was not playing in any theater in my city. This did not stop me. I did have to take a ferry and journey onwards to see Farm Dreams (err Rebuilding), but it was worth it. Hilariously, aside from me and my friend, there were four other people at my screening and at least two of them had made the same out-of-town journey as we did for the exact same purpose of completing the Josh O’Connor Fall 2025 Cinema Quartet. I made a zine to commemorate. If you also completed the quartet, please feel free to save, print, and fold your own.
Thunder Rock (1942)
A film with more potential than it managed to realize, but I found it deeply moving nonetheless. Probably a product of my deeply religious childhood, but I can be stirred by a well-orated sermon with an empathetic message. There is no preacher doing more stirring than a broken Michael Redgrave with tears in his eyes. A film set right in the thick of World War II, it does fail to interrogate the rise of fascism in the US and the UK. It puts sins of inaction and complacency alone on the two empires rather than active evil. But, I could not fail to be moved by Michael Redgrave’s hopelessness in the face of such complacency. His performance is visceral. The urge to shout the truth and expect it will cause people to act and to change and to rise up and to fight. Only to find that people are munching popcorn while watching news reports of Hitler’s invasions. Later in the same week of seeing this, I saw From Ground Zero in a sold-out cinema while people munched popcorn. A disturbing mirror to our own complacency. I am prone to the hopelessness. The cynical disbelief in my fellow humans. But, it must not be. Courage! We must have courage! Despair is a tool of fascism then, now, and always.
a few of the songs I left on repeat all year long
Always on My Mind - Pet Shop Boys
There’s A World - Sufjan Stevens
Jesus Christ - Woody Guthrie
Friends are Miracles - Le Ren
When I’m Gone - Phil Ochs
Ramblin’ Boy - Tom Paxton
Long Long Time - Linda Ronstadt
Without Her - Harry Nilsson
some favorite first-time reads
These are ten books I probably loved most of all the books I read for the first time in 2025. A couple were gifts from friends, and let that be a lesson to always read whatever books your friends lend or give you because they are always right. (This is a PSA to you if I have given or lent a book to you.) In alphabetical order by author.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024) - Julia Alvarez
Washington Square (1880) - Henry James
Fair Play (1989) - Tove Jansson
The Summer Book (1972) - Tove Jansson
Thunder Song (2024) - Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe
The Memory Police (1994) - Yōko Ogawa
The English Patient (1992) - Michael Ondaatje
The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) - Ruth Ozeki
Trance by Appointment (1939) - Gertrude Trevelyan
Desert of the Heart (1964) - Jane Rule
Brother John (1971)
A fascinating film built from the premise that Sidney Poitier can comfortably play an exalted human being whose mere presence can bring holy comfort or holy terror to those who deserve it.
And everyone knows innately which they deserve.
The girls know I love magical realism, and I love an allegory, and I love Sidney Poitier. So I loved this.
This plays in some ways as an extended Twilight Zone, but there is no neat tie-up and final moral justice. Some of the people who interact with Poitier are changed, but what does it say that this powerful visitor is unable to save this town or its residents from the machinations of racism. The town is dying--choking to death through the mining company refusing to recognize the union of Black workers and through the very work the mining company is doing to destroy the natural world. It's choking to death through the racism of its systems, both bureaucratic and, of course, policing.
It is suffocating, so naturally, Poitier's presence brings comfort because he is powerful he is a symbol he can do something.
But a symbol has no humanity, no room for the rhythms of daily life, no room to exist in contradictions or complexities.
Sidney Poitier's character here feels a bit like the logical conclusion of all the requirements that were made on Sidney Poitier to be Sidney Poitier, public figure from all corners.
White America couldn't deny Sidney Poitier; couldn't stop his ascension. But white America desperately wanted to contain and control his persona and his reach. This is exactly how the white people in this film interact with him: anger, suspicion, violence, and fear. Fear that he will expose them.
This makes his "fight" with the cop so off-kilter, but satisfying. All power in all forms is stripped from the cop, even his ability to speak and he is forced to cower and slink away silently--after wreaking such violence on the Black family in that home. He is never seen again.
Ultimately though, Poitier here is a mystery and a cipher. He has some kind of mission, some compulsion, that keeps him from being allowed to live and exist and stay.
Here, Poitier's John Kane has seen too much and knows too much. He bears witness and seems to intervene only occasionally.
All this to say, I bought in fully to this film as an angry, resigned (?) poem beautifully orated.
my 20 favorite films released in 2025
All films seen in the cinema with the exception of Rabbit Trap which never played in a cinema (in my state? anywhere? believe me, I tried).
Some of these films I loved for being transcendent works that made me think and feel in new ways or in the oldest ways. Some of these films I loved because I had a wonderful, fun, or engaging experience watching them.
Click through on titles for more information about each film.
Well, there ya go. A very short and incomplete list of things I loved in 2025. I started this post on New Year’s Eve, and I am actually publishing mid-February, so you can imagine my 2026 so far. Here’s to more wonderful art in the next year!