2025 - The Year's Movies In Review

Strangeness afoot with the way Blogger wants to format things these days, and after all this time my html-fu is so poor I don't really know how to import the log as a table without having some screwy formatting issues. It is, perhaps, a sign of how Microsoft and Google really would rather not have their products talking to each other at all; it's almost certainly at least partly my fault for still using Blogger after all this time.

Anyway!

It was a good year for movies. I don't just mean the movies I got around to--I suspect that the year that produced Sinners, Wake Up Dead Man, a decent Superman movie, and a fairly good Frankenstein would have a good chance of going down as a cinematic annus mirabilis like 1939, and I didn't even get out to see Weapons or One Battle After Another, both of which got pretty good reviews overall. It was a year that even minor offerings from Steven Soderbergh (Black Bag) and Yorgos Lanthimos (Bugonia) were delightful and Bryan Fuller's cinematic debut (Dust Bunny) was another delight that probably deserves minor classic status.

It was also an interesting year for me because three of the notable movies on my list, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999), and The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963) are among my favorite movies of all time--they're probably personal top 10, I think, though I've never really sat down to work out an actual list--and although I've seen each of them dozens of times, this year offered me my first opportunities to see them on a big screen and not just a television or computer monitor. Jaws and The Haunting especially stand out, because both movies (more than The Limey, though it's still a gorgeously shot flick) really offer up a lot more information on a great big screen, and I found myself absorbed in visual details I'd missed in dozens of smaller-format viewings. (Special call-out to The Haunting, since Robert Wise is infrequently recognized as the great director he actually was: there are all kinds of lovely uses of mirrors and reflections in The Haunting that I'd just never picked up on, alongside the unnerving way so many shots are framed (which I had picked up on in the past)).

Since I'm mentioning movies I'd never seen on the big screen before, I suppose I may as well mention that the local picture house did a showing of Mitchell in honor--perhaps it would be more apt to say "in memory"--of the passing of Joe Don Baker, and so not only did I get to see it on the big screen for the first time, it was my first viewing of the unedited movie, such as it is, and my first viewing without the silhouettes of a man and two robots superimposed over the image while they talk through it. If you haven't seen Mystery Science Theatre 3000's Mitchell, I'm among those who think it was their best episode, despite the fact I'm generally more Team Joel than Team Mike, and I do recommend it. I can also say now that the several minutes MST3k cut from the movie don't actually explain or clarify anything when they're in the movie, and while there is a scene that explains why John Saxon's character disappears from the movie about two-thirds of the way through the film (he dies while trying to kill Mitchell in a go-kart), it doesn't really quite explain anything at all (it's not the least bit clear in the unedited cut why John Saxon is trying to kill Joe Don Baker in a go-kart; Mitchell follows Deaney out to a dirt track where Deaney is racing go-karts, Deaney tries to kill Mitchell in a go-kart, and then Deaney dies in a go-kart; although Deaney has plenty of reasons to kill Mitchell by this point in the film, why he decides go-kart is the murder weapon of choice and right now is the perfect time and at this dirt track is the perfect place are all exercises author Ian Kennedy Martin doesn't seem engaged with and it's not clear why the audience should care more than he did when he was writing it).

(Within the last couple of weeks I learned from a Bluesky thread that Ian Kennedy Martin evidently self-plagiarized parts of Mitchell from a British television production called Detective Waiting that starred Kate Beckinsale's dad. Like, at least one entire scene and at least one other chunk of dialogue appear to be lifted straight from Detective Waiting and dropped into Mitchell with the biggest noticeable change being the replacement of British slang with American. I haven't had the chance to watch Detective Waiting but may need to, both out of morbid curiosity and genuinely wondering if Detective Waiting is a Rosetta Stone to decode just why Mitchell is so... Mitchell.)

The one other curiosity I'll mention in brief: this year saw two concert films released in IMAX where members of Pink Floyd perform in Roman coliseums. The first was the remastered re-release of Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, now called  Pink Floyd at Pompeii - MCMLXXII; the second was David Gilmour Live at the Circus Maximus, Rome, a film made during his last tour, promoting his most recent solo album (the very excellent Luck and Strange from 2024). Both are excellent if you're into that sort of thing (I very much am), but easy to pass on if you aren't (the Scatterkat enjoys enough early Floyd these days that she joined me for Pompeii (and liked it), but I went to Circus Maximus on my own, which was fine). The sound is excellent in both films and Pompeii looks particularly good now that the film has been remastered so the colors pop in ways they simply didn't in earlier home video issues.

If I'm picking three recommendations for 2025, I'll go with Sinners, Wake Up Dead Man, and Dust Bunny. As of this writing, the first two are available on streaming services, the last will probably be available soon, though if you see this soon after it posts, you may still catch it on a big screen.