2025 Oaties: Films

2026-01-02T03:34:04Z

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 Up Dead Man is a sequel, and Bugonia is another remake. I think the best wholly original film I saw was Marty Supreme, and even that feels like it exists in the shadow of Uncut Gems despite not being a sequel as such. I want to escape this spiral of endless reproductions and imitations. Is it too much to ask for something both new and excellent?

Films of the Years

This is truly where I have experienced the most unbridled joy in art this year. I watched 215 films this year, which is down from my all-time high in 2024 but still the second most of any year I've been keeping track. Most of these films I'd never heard of before. Many of them I loved, with a substantial amount of overlap between the two categories. And even of those I didn't love, I usually found something to appreciate. Even in bad film, there are elements of its time and its perspective that are fascinating to dive into. And as a result, there has been a considerable amount of change to my list of films of the years:

1942: Casablanca. With this year's watch of Cat People, I finally hit the five-film minimum necessary to add 1942 to my list. Cat People itself may be kind of dire, but Casablanca is the source of every quote you've ever heard for a reason.
1945: Brief Encounter. This was actually the first film I watched in 2025! Between it and Mildred Pierce, 1945 is now in play, and the former film takes it handily with its bittersweet romance and stalwart commitment to avoiding cliché.
1952: Limelight brings 1952 onto the board with a bang. I haven't watched much Chaplin at all, and I certainly didn't expect to see him (and Buster Keaton!) put up such a stunning dramatic performance. This film was such a surprising joy when I watched it year and I'm glad to be able to feature it on the list.
1954: Rear Window. Either of Carmen Jones and On the Waterfront would have allowed me to bring this onto the list, and so have the whole of the 1950s represented. And what a film for it: Rear Window is my personal favorite Hitchcock, an absolute tour de force of cinematic technique and gripping plot. It's actually been a few years since I watched it, and I might need to concoct an excuse to watch it again...
1966: The War Game replaces Daisies. A truly magnificent piece of agitprop, you can feel the palpable desperation in The War Game to get through to the average viewer about the unspeakable horror that a nuclear war would represent. While I enjoy and respect Daisies a lot, it's not nearly as profound nor as intense as this semi-documentary horror story.
1970: The Conformist. I'm shocked it took me so long to fill out 1970, by far the latest year I hadn't seen five films from, a dubious honor that has now fallen all the way back to 1947. I watched The Conformist in 2024 (Colossus: The Forbin Project and Count Yorga, Vampire were the films that finally filled out the quota), but I consider it a truly magnificent piece of post-fascist cultural introspection.
1975: Jeanne Dielman replaces Mirror. Look, I think very highly of Mirror. Tarkovsky giving himself wholly to abstraction is a marvelous thing. But I don't (yet) feel like I totally understand Mirror, whereas Jeanne Dielman became an immediate and undeniable presence in my artistic consciousness the moment I watched it (on a cinerama screen no less!). I may go back on this opinion again once I get around to watching Mirror a few more times, but for now this is my pick.
1993: Trois couleurs : Bleu replaces Groundhog Day. A slam dunk replacement if there ever was one. Groundhog Day is fun and shockingly savvy, but Trois couleurs as a whole is a masterpiece and Bleu is my favorite of the three by a comfortable margin. Just tremendous.
2007: Michael Clayton replaces Hot Fuzz. This year, Michael Clayton came to me like a cold drink in the desert. I watched it in December, as I was beginning to rotate in my mind the ideas that I would express in these posts, which is to say: as I was beginning to truly despair at the quality of art as a whole. To see a film so pristine, not even an art film as such but a thriller executed to perfection, did a lot to remind me that good art could exist and would again.
2024: Challengers replaces I Saw the TV Glow. It's not often that I replace the previous year's entry the very next year, let alone with something that I did in fact watch in the year it was released! I do still stand by my choice of I Saw the TV Glow as my 2024 film of the year, but it was by a razor-thin margin at the time and through the course of 2025 Challengers was the film that danced around my mind the most. I want these lists to be living documents more than records of years past; I already have blog archives and Letterboxd history for archives of years past! Today, going into 2026, Challengers is my film of 2024. Perhaps next year it will be something else entirely.

House of Nettles: #frankenstein

2025 Oaties: Films

Film of 2025: Frankenstein

Films of the Years