The Films I Watched in 2025

Against all odds, 2025 was another year where I watched movies. Once again, I kept track of each one and compiled them into tiers for the satisfaction of my brain; and once again, I have written brief thoughts on each of them for hopefully the gratification of you, dear reader. Like last year, I hit exactly 60 films, which is my annual goal.

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You can see how I tiered all 60 of these films in the above table, but I invite you to read further. On we go.

Just Trash

Wag the Dog, dir. Barry Levinson (1997)

The more movies I see that David Mamet wrote, the more convinced I am that Glengarry Glen Ross' scintillating script was an aberration. Wag the Dog is smug and pointless, a film in which every event on the news is framed as a psyop. Mamet reveals himself to be a moron every time he talks about politics, driven by pettiness and reactionary, conspiratorial thinking, so it should not be a surprise that he wrote a film about politics that, beyond some barely funny cracks at jingoism, is more or less nihilist.

A nihilist message is not necessarily a bad thing, but you still have to do something with it. One of my favorite comedies, Burn After Reading, mocks humanity's self-importance in the face of our lives' ultimate insignificance and absurdity. Wag the Dog's message is that The Powers That Be use The Media to lie to you, but its skepticism is so shallow and goofy — again, without being funny — that it becomes useless. When the United States government has illegally interfered with and waged wars on actual countries, hiding behind patriotic slogans and lying to its citizens, that government fabricating a brief military campaign to hide a scandal just does not serve as the prescient farce Mamet believes it to be.

Did Not Enjoy

The Lost Weekend, dir. Billy Wilder (1945)

A film as empathetic toward alcoholics as The Lost Weekend must have been revelatory in 1945. Eighty years later, it comes off more like a noble but imperfect first step. The simplicity of its portrayal of addiction, from the causes to the symptoms to recovery, did not work for me. Though far from a failure, the film just was not my thing.

The Films I Watched in 2024

After sports, my favorite hobby has long been watching movies. I won't try to define the reasons, or to explain why I have watched so little television by comparison, or ramble on about the beauty of film or whatever. There is no need when I provide no shortage of words over the rest of this post.

But I will say that, starting during the pandemic, I have tracked every film that I watch over the course of each year, and a couple years ago started bucketing them by how much I liked them. I will never get on Letterboxd, as I do not need another social media platform in my life. However, my brain demands that I organize trivial things. My vanity requires that I write my opinions. Hence, this post.

If you want the short version, you can find in this table all 60 films without commentary, sorted by tier.

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The long version, then, begins below. This post goes in reverse order from the table, starting with the one film I write off as worthless and ending on my ten favorite things I watched in 2024. Until the last section, the films are alphabetized within each tier.

Just Trash

Crash, dir. Paul Haggis (2004)

I added the "Just Trash" tier to my lists last year after watching Network (1976), a film that verbosely proclaims its own importance, intelligence, and righteousness at every opportunity. Crash, by comparison, is humbly earnest about its creator's faults: Paul Haggis, who is white, wrote the screenplay as a guilty reflection on his own racism a few years after being carjacked by Black men in Los Angeles.

To a degree, the thought is noble. A rich white man, however, is not the person the world needs writing parables about prejudice. "We're all a bit racist, but we're also all human" is not a profound thesis to an adult audience, or should not be. The premise is flawed from the start. The best-case scenario for this kind of movie is still at least a little overwrought and simplistic.

Yet even by sympathetic standards, Haggis' failure is spectacular. In the months since watching this film, its awfulness has haunted me to the point of costing me sleep. Crash tosses aside character growth as easily as it rushes to redeem its worst characters, fights racism with racist stereotypes and omnidirectional hate, uses ham-fisted symbolism, and in general does not seem to understand its own theses. It is utterly unsalvageable, only offering some perverse unintentional comedy to those not expecting its preposterous and incoherent turns.

Did Not Enjoy

The Raid, dir. Gareth Evans (2011)

The reason that this tier is called "Did Not Enjoy" instead of "Bad" or something similar is that sometimes a movie has some kind of merit but is just not my thing. The Raid is fairly good at what it is, which is to say an endless stream of impressively choreographed fight scenes and basically no plot or character depth. It's not my kind of action movie but can easily be someone else's.