My Top 25 of the Last 25: Girly Movies

I love girly movies.  And when I'm talking about girly movies, I don't necessarily mean films starring girls and women, or created by women.   I definitely don't mean romantic-comedies, though some of the movies below have romance and comedy in them.  I'm talking about the movies that are unapologetically, unabashedly, aimed at women.  These movies center on the female POV and treat the preferences, concerns, and tastes of women and girls seriously in a world that too often doesn't.  And though there are a few bittersweet entries, I find that the best girly movies focus on positivity and uplift, and are great for boosting my mood.

Legally Blonde - I resisted the charms of Elle Woods for a long time, but in the end it was impossible.  I love the character and I love this movie.  I love the notion of the ultra-feminine, bubbly blonde glam girl also being a whip-smart law student who uses her powers for good.  She can be a girly girl and do important, serious work.  She can reject the snobbery and privilege of the elites and choose sisterhood and solidarity, while still being her most fabulous self.  Is it a fantasy?  Yes.  Is it one we need?  Hell yes.

Catherine, Called Birdy - Easily the least popular film on this list, but it's such a great encapsulation of adolescent growing pains.  Catherine is growing up in an era where the rules of love and womanhood are completely out of step with how she wants to live her life, and her well-meaning father just doesn't understand.  And really, is that any different than how things are for some girls in every era?  And Bella Ramsay is perfect at embodying Birdy in all her rebellious, mischievous, stubborn impossibility.  

Pitch Perfect - It's "Glee" if it were from the creators of "30 Rock," which is more or less what happened here, because the main writer/producer of the series is Kay Cannon.  Honestly, the three "Pitch Perfect" movies have all blended together in my mind at this point, but I remember the first one being the funniest and it helped give Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson a significant boost in visibility.  And I appreciate that the comedy came first, inspiring other films like "Bottoms" to follow suit.  

One of Them Days - Let's hear it for the ones keeping it real.  Dreux and Alyssa, played by Keke Palmer and SZA, are just trying to come up with their overdue rent money and get through a bad day that keeps getting worse.  There are not enough theatrical comedies like this anymore - the right size and scope, aimed at the sorely underserved black audience, with the right combination of talent involved to give everybody the opportunity to shine.  A sequel is reportedly in the works, and I can't wait to see it.  

Bring it On - This has spawned six direct-to-video sequels so far.  Six!  Released in the year 2000, this barely made the cutoff date, and honestly this feels like a 90s movie more than a 2000s one culturally.  However, the impact of "Bring it On" is undeniable, a mixture of high energy sports movie, dance movie, and high school movie, with Kirsten Dunst and Gabrielle Union showing that they could carry a movie as they were transitioning from teen roles to leading lady status.  It holds up better that you'd think.

Lady Bird - There's probably too much Greta Gerwig on this list, but I had to have some Saoirse Ronan representation, and the best Saoirse Ronan movie is "Lady Bird."  She's an exceptional young woman, but like so many exceptional young women, she's got all the same problems that everyone else does growing up.  As the movie explores Lady Bird's universe, it's also a love letter to Gerwig's hometown of Sacramento and the benefits of a Catholic school education - not something you see much of in the movies anymore.

The Devil Wears Prada - Yes, part of the impetus for me writing this list was the hype for the arrival of "The Devil Wears Prada 2."  Do you remember in the mid-2000s when there was all this media about the fashion industry like "Project Runway" and "Ugly Betty" and "America's Next Top Model"?  Meryl Streep in this movie may as well have been the queen of that universe - a nightmare boss, but a figure of consummate taste, talent and professionalism to be admired, feared, and never taken for granted.   

Barbie - Everything about the promotional campaign, and later the awards campaign was so positive and fun.  It injected a burst of color and shine into the pop culture when we really needed it.  And Gerwig and Baumbach clearly understood the assignment, making a film that loves, hates, subverts, and pays homage to the titular toy representation of American femininity.  I would have liked it to be a little deeper, but then again I suspect America Ferrera's monologue and Ryan Gosling learning that he was  Kenough via dream ballet was probably as much as the general audience could handle.

Bend it Like Beckham - There were lots of good contenders for girly sports movies like "Whip It!" and "Blue Crush," but "Bend it Like Beckham" ended up being the one I couldn't leave off.  It's such a great snapshot of growing up as an immigrant kid, trying to balance all the competing demands of different cultures, parental expectations, and new opportunities.  It has one of the most genuinely sweet lesbian panic situations ever.  Oh, and this is the movie where most of us first saw Keira Knightley.

Kpop Demon Hunters - Finally, this is an unlikely charmer that I didn't see coming.  I've never really understood the appeal of K-pop.  However, the soundtrack is such an important part of why this movie works, delivering earworm after earworm to help enliven a familiar story about forbidden love and being a secret half-demon warrior.  The snazzy animation, wild humor, and some gentle ribbing of the music industry don't hurt either.  Thus, "Josie and the Pussycats" got edged out of the Top Ten.  

Ahem.

Josie and the Pussycats

Little Women

Whip It

Turning Red

The Princess Diaries

Romy and Michele's High School Reunion

Booksmart

Mean Girls

Polite Society

Eighth Grade

Bridesmaids

Frances Ha

Wicked

Miss Congeniality

Easy A

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My Favorite Jim Jarmusch Film

Jim Jarmusch is one of the undisputed stars of American independent cinema, who came out of the film school ecosystem in the early 1980s making these cool, sparse, almost experimental films, without much plot and even less action.  Forty years later, he's still making them, and his style hasn't changed much.  And it's taken me nearly that long to finally vibe with what he's doing.  I use vibe deliberately, because I think the key to Jarmusch is that he's an accomplished musician, and his filmmaking is an extension of his musical tastes and impulses.

Jim Jarmusch films don't tell stories in the traditional sense.  They have characters and settings.  They have moods and themes.  There are sometimes very precise patterns and rhythms of actions to be followed.  However, the most vital parts of Jarmusch movies are the ones where nothing in particular seems to be happening - the lulls in conversation, the pauses in activity, or the moments where a character seems lost in contemplation, thinking or weighing options.  Many of his films are collections of vignettes, where characters meet in various configurations, talk, and then separate.  And it's only at the end, after having witnessed all these seemingly incidental moments and encounters, or having followed along on an aimless journey to nowhere in particular, that it becomes clear that something has been gained from the experience.  

My favorite Jarmusch film is probably his most ambitious, filmed in five different cities, in four different primary languages, with a new cast and crew in each place.  It's essentially five short films with nothing to tie them together except for a basic premise - a taxi driver picks up a passenger or passengers one night, and they converse to pass the time during the trip.  The drivers and passengers are always strangers, often from very different walks of life, to keep things interesting.   The idea is that all of these stories are happening on the same night, at the same time, in different places across the globe.  This is "Night on Earth," where we start with a 7PM pickup at LAX airport in Los Angeles, and end in the suburbs of Helsinki roughly around 5:30 AM.       

Initially the premise feels like a fussy gimmick, but what's so fun about "Night on Earth" is that each of the segments is completely distinct, and feels very loose, improvisational, and unconstrained.  The direction taken by each of these stories feels largely driven by the performances, and there are some priceless ones here.  My favorite segment is the one set in New York, where an immigrant cab driver named Helmut, who is new to the job and can barely operate his vehicle, picks up the profane, fast-talking Yo Yo, who decides to drive the cab himself from Manhattan to Brooklyn, with Helmut as his passenger.  Yo Yo and Helmut are played by Giancarlo Esposito and Armin Mueller-Stahl, two performers with completely different energies and performance styles, who nonetheless play off each other wonderfully, especially when you throw Rosie Perez into the mix as Yo Yo's combative sister-in-law.  

Then there's the sexier, more mysterious Paris segment, where Isaach de Bankole's cab driver picks up a fiercely independent blind woman played by Beatrice Dalle as his fare, and the color barrier means nothing, but the difference in life experience means everything.  There's the awkwardness of the Los Angeles segment with Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, where the artifice is laid on thick, but it's hard not to get invested in the characters anyway.  And there's the Roman segment, the most blatantly comedic part of the movie, where a motormouthed driver played by Roberto Benigni takes a poor priest on the wildest  ride of his life.  And for a final note of existential melancholy, to help put everything into perspective, naturally we head to the frozen climes of Helsinki for a very sober Matti Pellonpaa to ferry home a trio of drunks as the sun comes up.  

Much of the music in the film was composed and performed by Tom Waits, who is one of Jarmusch's most frequent collaborators and appears in several of his films as an actor.  And as in all of Jarmusch's films, the music is half of the experience, setting the tone and the rhythm of each scene, and helping to define the tenor of each interaction as much as each of the five taxicabs define the physical spaces the camera and characters inhabit.  The steady beats of the nocturnal base accompany each transition in space and time, one of the only constants in the film.  

"Night on Earth" is not a piece of media to explain, but to inhabit, where we have an opportunity to share in these chance encounters with the characters, and see how barriers are crossed and common ground is reached - or at least sought out -  in every circumstance.  I think I love this film because it's so optimistic about human beings and human nature - the way that it captures our ability to find connections in unlikely places.  

And I get to enjoy a good, long drive without actually having to do any driving. 

What I've Seen - Jim Jarmusch

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

Down By Law (1986)

Mystery Train (1989)

Night on Earth (1991)

Dead Man (1995)

Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999)

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)

Broken Flowers (2005)

The Limits of Control (2009)

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Paterson (2016)

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

Father Mother Sister Brother (2026)

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"Hoppers" is a Delight

I got a little overhyped for "Hoppers," which is a pretty typical piece of children's entertainment when all is said and done, but it's definitely gutsier than most recent PIXAR films, and it's nice to see audiences responding so well to it.  I'll spoil the basic premise for this review, but will do my best not to get into the particulars of the plotting or give away any of the good jokes.  The less you know going into this one, the better.

Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) is a hotheaded college student who is staunchly devoted to protecting nature and animals.  She is especially keen on saving the glen and beaver pond where she spent much of her childhood with her beloved grandmother (Karen Huie), and where a new freeway extension is set to be built by the stubborn Mayor Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm).  One day, Mabel stumbles upon a secret project called "Hoppers" being carried out by her mentor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy).  She and her team have built robot animals that peoples' conscious minds can "hop" into "like 'Avatar.'"  Mabel puts herself into a beaver robot and sets out in search of the glen's missing animals, eventually uncovering a dastardly plot.  Other characters include the beaver king, George (Bobby Moynihan), an antagonistic caterpillar, Titus (Dave Franco), an intimidating bear named Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor), and another beaver named Loaf (Eduardo Franco), who is maybe a little too chill.

Initial trailers for "Hoppers" made the film look very similar to "The Wild Robot," which was also about a robot and a community of woodland creatures in the Pacific Northwest.  "The Wild Robot" even felt like a PIXAR movie more than a Dreamworks one, featuring heartwarming found family connections and meditations on parenthood.  "Hoppers" has some of this too, with Piper struggling with the loss of her grandmother, and forging new friendships.  However, "Hoppers" also has a lot of comedy in it.  And not just comedy, but zany, off-the-wall, we're-in a-cartoon comedy that isn't what I've come to expect from recent PIXAR movies. I liked that "The Wild Robot" was willing to be pretty frank about the perils of the natural world and the life cycle without sugarcoating things too much for a younger audience.  "Hoppers" goes a step further than that, mostly just for the sake of getting some surprisingly dark laughs.  And it's super effective at keeping the movie entertaining while getting its messages across.

Despite the more zany style of the humor, this still feels like a PIXAR film, mostly due to little things like the thoughtful way that the visual storytelling is executed, and the way that the worldbuilding has a couple of fantastical elements, but not too many.  The animals' character designs change depending on whether the POV character in each scene can understand them or not.  Mabel's beaver robot form looks like an ordinary beaver from a human POV, but immediately looks like Mabel, with her personality and expressiveness, from an animal POV, or when a human is using Dr. Sam's communication interface with the robots.  There are some great jokes that play around with this concept.  The editing often sells some of the punchlikes too - look out for those smash cuts.  

I also appreciate that "Hoppers" has some nuance when it comes to its eco-fable.  It doesn't just argue for the importance of nature, but also points out how the wrong kind of overzealous advocacy can end up doing more harm than good.  It would have been very easy to make Mayor Jerry an evil, irredeemable bad guy, but he's not.  There are degrees of villainy, and Mabel has to learn not to see the world in black and white.  The movie is pitched toward older kids, with some of the intense sequences pushing that PG rating, so parents should plan accordingly.  

However, this is the first PIXAR film in a while that I feel comfortable recommending without any reservations.  Some of their recent offerings have felt awfully polished and prestigious, but haven't been as entertaining as what's been coming out of its competitors.  "Hoppers" seems intent on proving otherwise, and I'm all for it.     

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"Send Help" is a Scream

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is an overacheiving corporate worker who has been promised a VP position at her company.  Unfortunately the new boss, an insufferable youngster named Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), won't give her what she's due.  However, the tables are turned during an overseas work trip, when the two are stranded on an uninhabited tropical island together, after their flight crashes.  

It's been far too long since we had an original Sam Raimi film, and this one is a lot of fun.  It's got action, comedy, bloody gore, and pig snot being flung on the camera lens.  I love that it gives Rachel McAdams a really juicy leading role.  Linda Liddle is great at her job, but she's got terrible people skills and some hygiene issues that signal that she's not very self-aware, and probably deluded about her career prospects.  McAdams isn't afraid to get gross or come off as a weirdo.  She's stellar at juggling the movie's variety of different tones, from straight drama to wildly over-the-top genre nastiness.  Dylan O'Brien is also very good at being obnoxious and awful, but also just charismatic enough that he's not entirely unsympathetic.  And that's important, given where the movie goes.  

You could classify "Send Help" as part of the recent spate of media about the class-divide, similar to "Triangle of Sadness" and "The White Lotus."  Linda turns out to be a "Survivor" enthusiast who thrives in the wild, while Bradley is useless.  However, Raimi has little interest in social satire, and puts all his efforts into thrills and mayhem.  Linda and Bradley might represent the forces of the privileged and the exploited, but it's their decisions as individuals that make the movie so compelling to watch.  It's not clear cut who you're supposed to be rooting for, all the way up to the end, and the movie gleefully keeps subverting common genre conventions and keeps the audience guessing.  What kind of movie are we even watching?  Is this a revenge thriller?  Is this a "Misery" style psycho caretaker scenario?  Is this some kind of twisted romance?  Maybe a little of everything?

One thing that I've noticed about modern comedies is that there aren't many of them that have a good grasp of comedic film language anymore.  Sam Raimi has always been fantastic at it.  There's a montage sequence involving Bradley getting dehydrated that's just a long string of dissolves of Dylan O'Brien head shots, floating over the screen one after the other.  It stood out because it had been so long since I'd seen any other action comedy attempt something similar - with the exception of last year's "Naked Gun" reboot. I hope to see more comedies that follow suit.   Raimi also manages the shifting tone extremely well.  Here, he balances cartoonish gags and heightened imagery with pretty grounded characters.  Sure, they're broadly drawn and are prone to unhinged behavior, but they exist in a pretty believable emotional reality for most of the film, so you get more invested in their clashes.   

My only major criticism of "Send Help" is of the ending, which I found too abrupt.  I liked the ultimate outcome, just not how we got there.  Maybe I was looking for more closure and maybe I was hoping for more carnage, but it feels like Raimi could have gotten more out of the material.  Then again, "Send Help" already runs 113 minutes, and hits every element you want out of a Raimi film, so it feels greedy to want more.  I hope the film's success means that we can get Rachel McAdams in more starring roles, and that it won't be over a decade before they let Sam Raimi make something similar again.  There hasn't been nearly enough screen splatter in circulation lately.

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"Paradise," Year Two

The second season of "Paradise" is different from the first.  It expands the show's universe, introduces many new characters, and alters the fundamental format of the series in some important ways.  It's also much easier to now categorize "Paradise" as a post-apocalyptic melodrama similar to "Station Eleven" or "The Last of Us," except "Paradise" is more hopeful about humanity than either of those shows, and avoids the bleakest material.  I never believed for a moment that our main character, Xavier Collins, was ever in any real danger as he searched the ruins of America in search of his missing wife.  

However, "Paradise" is still capable of some pretty strong dramatic hours of television, presenting several compelling portraits of different characters in the show's universe.  The season opener is about a tour guide at Graceland named Annie (Shailene Woodley), and her experience of the apocalypse and its aftermath.  Another is about a mailman, Gary Jones (Cameron Britton), and his survival story.  While much of the season is spent with Xavier, "Paradise" also keeps an eye on what's going on with the community he left behind in Colorado.  Agent Driscoll from last season gets a spotlight episode as the character dynamics of the rest of the regular cast go through some shakeups.

The eight-episode season seems a little too short, considering how much incident is packed into some of the storylines, but I thought that the creators did a decent job regardless.  While the plot twists often feel a little unlikely, the execution is always very good.  The deaths feel meaningful, big decisions carry weight, and the character arcs are satisfying, even if the logic of certain developments isn't quite there.  I get a sense that some elements are being set up for a potential third season that doesn't exist yet and may never exist, which is a little infuriating.  However, "Paradise" also manages to pull off some really good twists and subversions in a way that only happens when you have seasoned television writers who understand how to write good melodrama.  And that's rarer than you'd think when it comes to big, expensive genre shows these days.

The shape and the strengths of the series have become clearer.  Nearly all the best episodes of "Paradise" to date have been the little individual character studies, episodes that break away from the main stories and dig into people's pasts.  Sure, the big apocalypse flashback from the first season is still the high point of the show to date, but where "Paradise" has been consistently excellent is in how it explores the lives of specific individuals.  So many of the people who cross paths with Xavier this year are complete strangers to him, but their stories are just as compelling and eventful.  The way that the show gives these smaller histories the narrative space to play out in meaningful ways is the big thing that distinguishes "Paradise" from most other post-apocalyptic shows.

There's still plenty of genre material too - the finale features several impressive large scale action set pieces that feel appropriately epic.  Getting to that point is pretty rocky this year, though.  The Colorado storyline is the weaker part of this season, reorienting to focus on Sinatra, Agent Driscoll, and Sarah Shahi's therapist character,  Dr. Torabi, who find themselves in the middle of a power struggle as outside threats emerge.  A couple of additional episodes really could have helped here, if only to keep much of the talented cast from feeling underutilized.  As for Xavier's storyline, I won't spoil whether or not he finds his wife, but I imagine that this also would have played out better over a longer stretch of episodes.   

Still, I appreciate that the season wraps up pretty conclusively and manages to find a natural end point, in case this turns out to be the last season.  The alternative would be "The Last of Us" approach, where the material for one season got awkwardly split up over two, with a very long gap in between.  This season's ending might be rushed, but it's serviceable.  Of course, the door is left open for more, and if the show does come back it's very likely going to be a very different show again.  I think I'd be okay with that.  

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Behold "Nirvanna the Band, The Show, The Movie"

I don't think you need to go into "Nirvanna the Band, The Show, The Movie" knowing anything about its rather convoluted background, but it doesn't hurt to set up a few things up front.  Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, lifelong best friends, created the mockumentary web series "Nirvana the Band, the Show," in 2007.  This became the Viceland TV series "Nirvanna the Band, the Show" ten years later, which ran for two seasons. The premise is simple - Canadian musicians Matt and Jay want to book their two-man band for a show at the Rivoli club in Toronto.  Matt and Jay do this in the most circuitous way possible, cooking up wild PR stunts and complicated schemes that often involve filming on-the-street interactions with non-actors.  As children of the 80s, their deeply silly manchild adventures involve a lot of references to old movies and television shows.

"Nirvanna the Band, The Show, The Movie" is essentially a super long and more elaborate episode of the show, where Matt and Jay are up to their usual hijinks.  The big stunt is supposed to be skydiving off of the CN Tower into the SkyDome stadium during a baseball game, but that's just the start.  Inspired by "Back to the Future," Matt manages to turn the band's RV into a time machine, powered by an ancient bottle of Orbitz.  This sends them back to 2008, to their original webseries, where things get complicated quickly.  Matt and Jay reportedly did not get any permits for what they filmed at the CN Tower.  Also, recreating 2008 Toronto and their old apartment on a very modest budget couldn't have been easy.  Fans already familiar with Matt and Jay will likely appreciate these efforts more, but there were multiple scenes where I was delighted to discover I had no idea how they'd pulled off the interactions.  Was it archival footage?  Deft use of CGI?  Or did they actually build a time machine somehow?  

However, the real fun of "Nirvanna the Band, The Show, The Movie" is getting to know these two goofy filmmakers, who were a part of the first wave of internet creatives who cut their teeth on shoestring web projects with DIY production values.  The shaggy style of the humor, the unpolished visuals, and the earnestly chaotic plot are all reminiscent of 2000-era internet culture in a tremendously appealing way.  There's a commitment to showcasing Toronto and sticking to their lo-fi filmmaking techniques that adds to the charm.  Even in the big action finale, they still find a way to incorporate unscripted moments with random people that just happen to be where they're filming.  There's also a genuinely poignant arc where Jay considers abandoning the friendship, after realizing he's spent so much time with Matt getting absolutely nowhere with their goals.  The contrast between the two of them as twenty-somethings in the web series and much schlubbier forty-somethings in the present day is a source of both humor and poignancy.   

  

I've seen a lot of web creators from Matt and Jay's cohort crash and burn over the years, sometimes running afoul of the changing popular culture or losing their verve when they move into more commercial projects.  What's so fascinating about "Nirvanna the Band, The Show, The Movie" is that it's essentially the same thing that these two have been doing since 2007.  The creators have gotten more skillful after working on several other films, the budget has expanded, and their ambitions have grown, but Matt and Jay are still playing the same pair of genial oddballs, and seeing what they can get away with via guerilla filmmaking tactics.  And they're absolutely fine with that.  The movie reportedly came about because their television show was cancelled when Viceland went kaput, but we might just get a third season if the movie does well enough.    

I'll be on the lookout for a way to watch "Nirvanna the Band, The Show," which seems to be stuck in copyright limbo at the moment.  I'm also looking forward to any behind-the-scenes material that will be made available for the movie, which I suspect will be as much fun to watch as the movie itself.  

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And What Didn't Make My Top Ten Films of 2025

As a companion piece to my Top Ten list, every year I write a post to discuss some of the other major films that got a lot of positive attention.  I find this exercise helpful in providing context for my own choices and how I feel about the year in film as a whole.  It is also a lot of fun.  Please note that I will not be writing about the films listed among my honorable mentions, including "Marty Supreme," "Train Dreams," and "Frankenstein."

Let's start with the foreign films, because there were a lot of big titles being talked about this year that I failed to connect with.  Filmmakers I generally really enjoy, like Kleber Mendonça Filho with "The Secret Agent," Joachim Trier with "Sentimental Value," and Jafar Panahi with "It Was Just an Accident," made films that just sailed over my head.  I can tell they're all very well made, but they either had characters I found unengaging, or were referencing political situations that I didn't have enough information to find resonant.  I had to look up what was going on with the disembodied leg in "The Secret Agent," which didn't land at all when I was actually watching the film.  "No Other Choice" just confirms for me that Park Chan-wook's sense of humor and mine do not vibe at all.  Oliver Laxe's "Sirat" was intriguing, but the unconventional plot left me adrift.  Bi Gan's "Resurrection" was beautiful, but so experimental that I had trouble parsing it. 

Among the awards contenders, "Bugonia" had a lot of strong performances and ideas that didn't cohere in the end.  I found "The Testament of Ann Lee" an incredibly brave film which must have been difficult to get made, but it wasn't as compelling as I hoped.  "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" was simply too anxiety-inducing for me to enjoy, though it had a great Rose Byne performance, and some fantastic imagery.  "Sorry, Baby" had a few strong sequences in isolation, but the main character rubbed me the wrong way early on, and the film  never managed to win me over.  "Song Sung Blue" was better than I expected, and "The Smashing Machine" far, far worse, but both were based on more interesting documentaries.  Speaking of documentaries, I was a fan of "Predators," "The Perfect Neighbor," "Mr. Nobody vs Putin," and "The Librarians," but when it came to their filmmaking, none of them really distinguished themselves.

There weren't many popular favorites this year in contention.  I'm glad that the new "Superman" came out so well, but it's a little too comics-obsessed and features too many of James Gunn's quirks for me to fully embrace. My favorite superhero film of the year was the very imperfect "Thunderbolts."  I'm very happy for the success of "KPop Demon Hunters," but it's too derivative and slapdash for me to count as a favorite.  It was a tough year for animated films in general, and nothing really stood out.  "Avatar: Fire and Ash" looked great, but offered nothing new.  "28 Years Later" was innovative, and I liked the third act turn, but there were far more accomplished horror films last year.  "One of Them Days" was the kind of comedic crowd-pleaser I want more of, but could have been better.

Among the smaller titles that people were championing, "Eddington" struck me as a "Beau is Afraid" retread set in the real world that was very smart, but a whole lot less funny in that context.   "Pillion" was enjoyable, but ultimately not to my tastes.  I really liked the performances in "Black Bag," but the film as a whole felt awfully slight.  "The Mastermind" featured some great work by Josh O'Connor, but he was better in "Wake Up Dead Man."    "The Shrouds," "Father Mother Sister Brother" and "Vulcanizadora" were all very singular films with strong points of view, but not as good as similar titles from the same directors.  And I really liked "Peter Hujar's Day," but I suspect I liked it for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality, so I'm leaving it off. 

Films that were very close to making my honorable mentions this year include "Blue Moon," "Relay," "40 Acres," "Familiar Touch," "The Long Walk," "Freaky Tales," "A Savage Art," and "A Little Prayer."

And that's my 2025 in film.  Happy watching.

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