The younger great-nephew didn’t want the box his gift came in. Wally is more than happy to check it out. Lav will destroy it later.
Status:
Bit bored of saying how tired I am so here’s my top 16 films I watched in 2025.
- The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography (2016)
- The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025)
- Blue Moon (2025)
- The Brutalist (2024)
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
- The French Dispatch (2021)
- I Am Martin Parr (2024)
- Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching (2025)
- My Old Ass (2024)
- Nosferatu (2024)
- One Battle After Another (2025)
- The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
- A Real Pain (2024)
- The Substance (2024)
- Sunlight (2024)
- Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
All of the above I rated five stars. I watched a total of 77 films this year (so far - might watch one tonight or tomorrow) and they break down like this:
16 at ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ - Best thing ever. Would rewatch and highly recommend.
36 at ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆ - Very good and a satisfying watch.
23 at ⭐️⭐️⭐️☆☆ - Adequate entertainment. Enjoyed it for what it was.
2 at ⭐️⭐️☆☆☆ - Don’t exactly regret watching but probably wouldn’t recommend.
0 at ⭐️☆☆☆☆ - Bobbins. Avoid.
The lowest rating is a bit misleading as anything that poor didn’t make it past 15 minutes as so wasn’t actually “watched”. But I’m fairly happy with the distribution. Watched a lot of things, most were good.
From the four star list, a few that I’d like to draw attention to:
- Agent of Happiness (2024)
- Paying For It (2024)
- September 5 (2024)
- Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
- The Surfer (2024)
Something I’d like to change going forward is to dig a bit deeper into the archive and augment my bias towards new releases. Not just filling in gaps, particularly in continental European cinema, but to also revisit favourite films I’ve not seen since I was a young’un and see if they stand up to my wizened eyes.
If nothing interesting happens tomorrow I’ll tell you all about the telly I watched this year. Fingers crossed, eh?
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time: David Ricardo - the free trade dude who really didn’t like landlords.
Reading:
- What an unprocessed photo looks like - I have an intrinsic dislike for the hyperreal photos that come out of modern cameraphones but it’s worth remembering all digital images have been processed and manipulated to make them make sense to human eyes and brains. To probably misquote Ansel Adams, the work only starts with the camera, most of it is done in the darkroom.
- Campaigner turned down MBE over ‘scapegoating’ of people with disabilities - the best people in the New Years honours list are those who turn the damned things down.
- Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought - Benjamin Zephaniah