The Favorites of 2025

Numerous tragedies abound between the personal and the political. Grief, heartbreak, episodic fits of voluntary solitude. If 2025 were my year of moribund shock, the key antidote from having slipped into full numbness remained reliably found in the stimulant wealth of cinema. Attempting to forge a thread of thematic coherence as I usually do among my viewings is of low motivation to me this year, as recollecting anything from much of the previous 12 months only leads me to a diluted mess of scattered debris & vague shapes where cogency is normally located. Think of my mind matter as a Rothko painting for this chapter. Still colorful, still alive, but harbored with the abstruse etchings of the human rough. My only interest now to list & share the films I was luckiest to encounter. Instead of therapy, I went to the movies.

For 2025, I've decided to alter my format for listing newly released favorites & first time discoveries as one all-inclusive chunk neatly split into two parts. You know, like Rothko.

The Discoveries

MARNIE (Alfred HITCHCOCK, 1964)

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (José Luis GUERÍN, 2007)

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (Jean EUSTACHE, 1973)

KEEP IT QUIET (Benoit JACQUOT, 1999)

TWENTIETH CENTURY (Howard HAWKS, 1934)

LA FAMILLE WOLBERG (Axelle ROPERT, 2009)

RENDEZ-VOUS (Andre TECHINE, 1985)

LES ROSES DE LA VIE (Paul VECCHIALI, 1962)

LONGING (Valeska GRISEBACH, 2006)

IN THIS VERY MOMENT (Christoph HOCHHÄUSLER, 2003)

New Releases & Premieres

MOON (Kurdwin AYUB)

Austrian austerity in contact with the barbs of foreign oppression.

THE ICE TOWER (Lucile HADŽIHALILOVIĆ)

Drawn towards a cold bosom in search of inner warmth.

WHERE TO LAND (Hal HARTLEY)

A meta textual looking glass for a storied artist grasping with his twilight.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Joachim TRIER)

An intersectional apotheosis for Trier, where his Scandinavian art film bumps up against the tides of an increasingly commodified global arthouse.

NOUVELLE VAGUE (Richard LINKLATER)

An elegy to an artistic & intellectual hive and their network of process.

SUSPENDED TIME (Olivier ASSAYAS)

Personal polemics made less agonizing through bucolic leisure & the beauty of Nine d'Urso.

AFTERNOONS OF SOLITUDE (Albert SERRA)

Two mortal vessels engaged in their own survival, bathed in the ornament of their own mortality.

THE TEMPLE WOODS GANG (Rabah AMEUR-ZAÏMECHE)

Dreams of the working class aspirant towards life and materialized through death.

GRAND TOUR (Miguel GOMES)

Revisiting the ethnocentrism of early Western cinema ala Ford, Murnau & von Sternberg and pushing it up against images of the post-colonialist present to offer a dialectic for how the former ultimately fared in history.

VISITING HOURS (Patricia MAZUY)

Playful contrasting of Huppert & Herzi's screen personas as tethered analogs to their characters' class strata and the behavioral roles assumed.