I feel a little less dire about the films of 2025 than I do about the games, but only a little. There are no films I found outright repulsive, which is a win I suppose, although I do feel like I'm still inhabiting the hater spirit in being relatively cool on films that sent people at large into raptures. Sinners was undeniably cool, but it was also unfocused, lacking in the clarity of purpose that's necessary to make a truly excellent film about supernatural horrors. One Battle After Another is principled in a shockingly impressive direction, but doesn't quite land the plane on its ambitions. Wake Up Dead Man is an excellent whodunit, but the writing and characterization around that ends up cartoonish as often as it is profound.

The other sad fact of this year is that there's no film from it that hit me hard enough that I have given it a full five stars. I do try to be conservative about giving out my highest possible rating, but despite that I've watched multiple five-star films each year all the way back through 2021. Worse still, looking back through the films that came out this year and my friends' reactions to them, I don't know if there's anything that's even plausible that I would love wholeheartedly.

This has been a grim year in a lot of ways, and an infertile media landscape is hardly the worst of it. But it's also hard to say that the two are unrelated. How can you separate the systematic evisceration of life through genocide and culture through LLMs from the faltering of art itself? I suppose, if there's a silver lining to be had, it's that this ignites in me the fire to create things of beauty myself. And I can only hope I'm not the the only one.

Film of 2025: Frankenstein

I'm not universally a fan of Guillermo del Toro's work, although I'm always a fan of the way he thinks about and articulates his relationship to art. Frankenstein, though, hit for me in a way that nothing he's made has since Pacific Rim. It thoroughly embodies his philosophies of creation, perhaps because it's about creation. I also can't deny the influence on me from the large volume of quotes and making-of shots that I saw on Tumblr—getting into the artist's head doesn't always help make the art more compelling, but in this case it worked wonders.

The other thing that boosts this to the top spot, of course, is the lack of competition. The only other film that I gave the same rating was Naked Gun, which I do heartily appreciate as a proper comedy that refuses the tyranny of the deadpan. But ultimately the craftsmanship of Frankenstein won out for me over the exuberance of Naked Gun.

It's not lost on me that these two are an adaptation and a remake, as I was bemoaning in my post on games as well. Wake…