KD^3C^3 - 20251228 I was pretty shook
It’s the last one of these for the year. Can you believe I started this back in 2018? Seems like quite the accomplishment. I’m going to take next week off, nd possibly the week after that depending on how I feel. But I’m sure you’ll get by without me.
Last year I set a goal for myself to get my “owned but unwatched” pie of movies down somewhat. I would like to say I accomplished that task, so let’s do some math. I started with about 160 movies in the list at the start of the year. And my letterbox long indicates that I watched 130 movies that I own. But not all of those were first time watches, because I rewatch movies too, so 26 of those were rewatches. If you’re doing the math along at home, you can probably tell that the list of “owned but unwatched” movies has now been lowered to 164. Wait, that can’t be right? It can, because I didn’t stop acquiring movies either. The biggest culprits were some box sets. I picked up the complete Abbot and Costello Universal Pictures box set, so that’s about 30 movies right there. And the Jacques Tati Criterion box set had 6 features, plus a bunch of short films. There was the Wallace and Gromit set, the Golden Age of Television set, and the Wallace Shawn/Andre Gregory set. All told, I ended up adding about 100 movie to my collection. It wasn’t really on purpose. and I keep telling myself I’ll buy fewer, but when a good enough deal comes along I have a hard time saying no. There’s always next year.
Even though it isn’t quite the end of the year, I strongly suspect nothing I will watch in the next few days will break my top 10, so what not share my top 10 new movies I watched this year? That is new to me, some of these have been around for a long time, but I only saw them for the first time in 2025. I’ve been struggling with this list, in part because I decided to rank every single movie I watched this year, which was frankly a terrible idea. But I did it. Technically I did it three ties and I wasn’t happy with any of the outcomes, so I used the info from all three rankings, averaged together and then freely moved things around based on vibes. I’d an impossible task and I made it more impossible. But let's get on with the list.
1. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library - I watched this on January 2. DO you know how hard it has been to find a better movie this year? I kept saying, sure ly something will beat this out in the list, but nothing really topped it. Frederick Wiseman is an amazing documentarian, and this might be my favorite of his works I have ever seen. A three hour long documentary set entirely within the branches of the New York Public Library. Wiseman’s signature style is that he doesn’t use narration or interviews. He just shoots what I presume to be thousands of hours of footage and lets the narrative emerge in the juxtaposition of scenes as he edits them together. I love libraries and if anyone ever asks me why, i could point to this movie. Libraries serve everyone in the community, beyond just lending books, they are a place of building community and other services. Even at three hours, this was captivating and feels like just the tip of the iceberg,
2. The Thing - John Carpenter’s frozen horror of paranoia. This is one of those movies that always sliced the reaction of “You haven’t seen the Thing?” and I hadn’t. But even coming to it as hyped as it was, I still think this isa nearly perfect movie. the sort of movie that will ave you looking at everything a little differently for the next couple days after watching it, because your fight or flight reflex has been flipped so hard.
3. One Cut of the Dead - I went into this knowing almost nothing about it. The premise is “what if they made a one-take, no cut zombie movie? Which is an amazing premise, but it actually goes beyond that in ways that I don’t want to spoil. It’s kind of a hard movie to track down, never having hit any streaming services. I managed to get a copy from, where else, my local library.
4. Wake up Dead Man - Right at the end of the year we got the latest Benoit Blanc movie. Due to marketing people not trusting audiences, these get subtitled “a knives out mystery” but I think that really is a terrible name. The franchise (if we have to call it that) is based around Benoit Blanc, the detective. Knives Out was the first mystery, but calling every subsequent movie that comes out a knives out movie is like calling evrery Sherlock Holmes movie “a study in scarlet movie.” But I’ll get off my soapbox. Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig team up again for a trilling gothic mystery set in and around an upstate New York church that is in decline. Something I love about these movies is how the play around with structure, but in a way that never feels flashy or in your face. This one is probably the most subtle about its narrative trickery, but it’s only subtle in so much as it tells you exactly what it’s doing while getting you to forget it told you. This isn’t favorite of the Benoit Blanc moves so far. Oh and also it’s absolutely gorgeous, the way they use light is almost unmatched.
5. Elevator to the Gallows - I mostly know Louis Malle as a director through My Dinner With Andre, a movie about two dudes talking in a restaurant. It’s a great movie, but it’s hardly a complicated picture. So imagine my surprise when I picked up his first feature and it’s a tightly plotted new wave thriller. The movie starts with a crime. The sort of crime that opens an episode of Columbia, meticulously planned and well executed. Except something goes wrong. The rest of the movie follows the outcome of that little mistake. It never quite goes where unexpected, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
6. Taxi - Jafar Panahi makes a movie from inside a taxi cab. After Jafar Panahi was banned by his country from making movies, he made This is Not a Film, entirely within his own apartment, documenting his thoughts and what it felt like to be barred from the thing that gave him purpose. Then he got back to making movies, even while banned. Taxi takes place inside a cab that Pahani drives around Tehran. A move that takes place in close to real time and was shot illegally, as we meet people, become briefly a part of their lives and then they exit. Pahani plays himself, and the line between reality and fiction is deliberately blurred. It doesn’t quite reach the highs of last year’s number one on this list (No Bears) but it’s still a stellar picture.
7. The Wooster Group presents Hamlet - this is technically just called Hamlet, but I watched over a dozen movies called Hamlet (or something close) this year. The Wooster Group is an experimental theater group that has been around since the 70s. They do weird and unexpected things with theater. This particular production is of Hamlet, but specifically it is a live recreation of Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, more commonly known as Richard Burton’s Hamlet. Richard Burton’s Hanlet was performed on broadway in 1964 and filmed in front of a live audience from 17!different cameras it could also been shown in theaters. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet recreates that production live on stage as the filmed version plays. It gets a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist. This Hamlet manages to be my favorite of the year (maybe not the best, but still my favorite) and it does so in part by over-fixating on the text and production and performances of Burton’s Hamlet. Sometimes it feels like versions of Hamlet jettison the text, or treat it as an obstacle to overcome, but here Wooster takes a literalist approach so serious that it turns the play almost inside out. A joy to behold.
8. Kidz Klub - This is a video collage by the group known as Everything is Terrible. They take old movies and re-cut them together into a deliberately overwhelming sensorial experience. Often there’s a theme to the movies they make and this one is all about the children. Kids media is weird, maybe the weirdest kind of media we have. And EiT takes that weirdness that simmers below the surface and through chaotic juxtaposition brings it to the surface. I don’t know if I can easily recommend watching this one, but I loved the ride.
9. In Jackson Heights - Frederick Wiseman’s second appearance on this list. In Jackson Heights takes place in the titular New York neighborhood, in Wiseman’s signature style. This one surprised me by having more of a direct narrative through line than some of the other movies I’ve seen of his. We get recurring locations and people seeing events unfold over time. Where Ex Libris feels like a celebration of community when it comes together to raise everyone up, this feels like a look at how we have actually achieved that yet. We spend a lot of time in a center for recent immigrants and heard their stories of hardship was pretty difficult. There’s also a running thread about gentrification and another about aging, that aren’t quite as strong, but the whole thing leaves you asking lots of good questions about who we are and who we want to be.
10. The Meaning of Life - Don Hertzfelt will always be known by most people who know his work as the “my spoon is too big” guy. He made a silly but impressive cartoon called Rejected and it feels like everything he has made since the has been at least a little bit in conversation with how he feels about that. This short film interrogates the meaning of life, and the futility of asking the wrong questions. A cacophony of voices and images, hand drawn and evolving and not a bad way to spend 12 minutes.
You can find the rest of the movies I watched for the first time this year here, ranked as best as I could.
Last year I set a goal for myself to get my “owned but unwatched” pie of movies down somewhat. I would like to say I accomplished that task, so let’s do some math. I started with about 160 movies in the list at the start of the year. And my letterbox long indicates that I watched 130 movies that I own. But not all of those were first time watches, because I rewatch movies too, so 26 of those were rewatches. If you’re doing the math along at home, you can probably tell that the list of “owned but unwatched” movies has now been lowered to 164. Wait, that can’t be right? It can, because I didn’t stop acquiring movies either. The biggest culprits were some box sets. I picked up the complete Abbot and Costello Universal Pictures box set, so that’s about 30 movies right there. And the Jacques Tati Criterion box set had 6 features, plus a bunch of short films. There was the Wallace and Gromit set, the Golden Age of Television set, and the Wallace Shawn/Andre Gregory set. All told, I ended up adding about 100 movie to my collection. It wasn’t really on purpose. and I keep telling myself I’ll buy fewer, but when a good enough deal comes along I have a hard time saying no. There’s always next year.
Even though it isn’t quite the end of the year, I strongly suspect nothing I will watch in the next few days will break my top 10, so what not share my top 10 new movies I watched this year? That is new to me, some of these have been around for a long time, but I only saw them for the first time in 2025. I’ve been struggling with this list, in part because I decided to rank every single movie I watched this year, which was frankly a terrible idea. But I did it. Technically I did it three ties and I wasn’t happy with any of the outcomes, so I used the info from all three rankings, averaged together and then freely moved things around based on vibes. I’d an impossible task and I made it more impossible. But let's get on with the list.
1. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library - I watched this on January 2. DO you know how hard it has been to find a better movie this year? I kept saying, sure ly something will beat this out in the list, but nothing really topped it. Frederick Wiseman is an amazing documentarian, and this might be my favorite of his works I have ever seen. A three hour long documentary set entirely within the branches of the New York Public Library. Wiseman’s signature style is that he doesn’t use narration or interviews. He just shoots what I presume to be thousands of hours of footage and lets the narrative emerge in the juxtaposition of scenes as he edits them together. I love libraries and if anyone ever asks me why, i could point to this movie. Libraries serve everyone in the community, beyond just lending books, they are a place of building community and other services. Even at three hours, this was captivating and feels like just the tip of the iceberg,
2. The Thing - John Carpenter’s frozen horror of paranoia. This is one of those movies that always sliced the reaction of “You haven’t seen the Thing?” and I hadn’t. But even coming to it as hyped as it was, I still think this isa nearly perfect movie. the sort of movie that will ave you looking at everything a little differently for the next couple days after watching it, because your fight or flight reflex has been flipped so hard.
3. One Cut of the Dead - I went into this knowing almost nothing about it. The premise is “what if they made a one-take, no cut zombie movie? Which is an amazing premise, but it actually goes beyond that in ways that I don’t want to spoil. It’s kind of a hard movie to track down, never having hit any streaming services. I managed to get a copy from, where else, my local library.
4. Wake up Dead Man - Right at the end of the year we got the latest Benoit Blanc movie. Due to marketing people not trusting audiences, these get subtitled “a knives out mystery” but I think that really is a terrible name. The franchise (if we have to call it that) is based around Benoit Blanc, the detective. Knives Out was the first mystery, but calling every subsequent movie that comes out a knives out movie is like calling evrery Sherlock Holmes movie “a study in scarlet movie.” But I’ll get off my soapbox. Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig team up again for a trilling gothic mystery set in and around an upstate New York church that is in decline. Something I love about these movies is how the play around with structure, but in a way that never feels flashy or in your face. This one is probably the most subtle about its narrative trickery, but it’s only subtle in so much as it tells you exactly what it’s doing while getting you to forget it told you. This isn’t favorite of the Benoit Blanc moves so far. Oh and also it’s absolutely gorgeous, the way they use light is almost unmatched.
5. Elevator to the Gallows - I mostly know Louis Malle as a director through My Dinner With Andre, a movie about two dudes talking in a restaurant. It’s a great movie, but it’s hardly a complicated picture. So imagine my surprise when I picked up his first feature and it’s a tightly plotted new wave thriller. The movie starts with a crime. The sort of crime that opens an episode of Columbia, meticulously planned and well executed. Except something goes wrong. The rest of the movie follows the outcome of that little mistake. It never quite goes where unexpected, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
6. Taxi - Jafar Panahi makes a movie from inside a taxi cab. After Jafar Panahi was banned by his country from making movies, he made This is Not a Film, entirely within his own apartment, documenting his thoughts and what it felt like to be barred from the thing that gave him purpose. Then he got back to making movies, even while banned. Taxi takes place inside a cab that Pahani drives around Tehran. A move that takes place in close to real time and was shot illegally, as we meet people, become briefly a part of their lives and then they exit. Pahani plays himself, and the line between reality and fiction is deliberately blurred. It doesn’t quite reach the highs of last year’s number one on this list (No Bears) but it’s still a stellar picture.
7. The Wooster Group presents Hamlet - this is technically just called Hamlet, but I watched over a dozen movies called Hamlet (or something close) this year. The Wooster Group is an experimental theater group that has been around since the 70s. They do weird and unexpected things with theater. This particular production is of Hamlet, but specifically it is a live recreation of Hamlet from the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, more commonly known as Richard Burton’s Hamlet. Richard Burton’s Hanlet was performed on broadway in 1964 and filmed in front of a live audience from 17!different cameras it could also been shown in theaters. The Wooster Group’s Hamlet recreates that production live on stage as the filmed version plays. It gets a little more complicated than that, but you get the gist. This Hamlet manages to be my favorite of the year (maybe not the best, but still my favorite) and it does so in part by over-fixating on the text and production and performances of Burton’s Hamlet. Sometimes it feels like versions of Hamlet jettison the text, or treat it as an obstacle to overcome, but here Wooster takes a literalist approach so serious that it turns the play almost inside out. A joy to behold.
8. Kidz Klub - This is a video collage by the group known as Everything is Terrible. They take old movies and re-cut them together into a deliberately overwhelming sensorial experience. Often there’s a theme to the movies they make and this one is all about the children. Kids media is weird, maybe the weirdest kind of media we have. And EiT takes that weirdness that simmers below the surface and through chaotic juxtaposition brings it to the surface. I don’t know if I can easily recommend watching this one, but I loved the ride.
9. In Jackson Heights - Frederick Wiseman’s second appearance on this list. In Jackson Heights takes place in the titular New York neighborhood, in Wiseman’s signature style. This one surprised me by having more of a direct narrative through line than some of the other movies I’ve seen of his. We get recurring locations and people seeing events unfold over time. Where Ex Libris feels like a celebration of community when it comes together to raise everyone up, this feels like a look at how we have actually achieved that yet. We spend a lot of time in a center for recent immigrants and heard their stories of hardship was pretty difficult. There’s also a running thread about gentrification and another about aging, that aren’t quite as strong, but the whole thing leaves you asking lots of good questions about who we are and who we want to be.
10. The Meaning of Life - Don Hertzfelt will always be known by most people who know his work as the “my spoon is too big” guy. He made a silly but impressive cartoon called Rejected and it feels like everything he has made since the has been at least a little bit in conversation with how he feels about that. This short film interrogates the meaning of life, and the futility of asking the wrong questions. A cacophony of voices and images, hand drawn and evolving and not a bad way to spend 12 minutes.
You can find the rest of the movies I watched for the first time this year here, ranked as best as I could.