What I've Caught Up With, December 2025 Part 1

I realize that January 1 of any year is an arbitrary place to start making changes, but it does feel somehow natural. As always, my goal is always to watch 400 movies over the course of the year. Mathematically, this works out to one movie per day plus three additional movies per month. It’s not that much, and yet it’s a goal that I almost always fall short on.

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2024

The Contenders:

Flow (winner)
Inside Out 2
Memoir of a Snail
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
The Wild Robot

End of Year Sixteen

I barely cracked 300 movies this year. It’s a little disappointing on the surface, but considering the year I had, it’s actually kind of impressive. 2025 has been a meat grinder for me; I’m not looking for sympathy or pats on the back, and I’m not trying to compare misery dicks with anyone on this. It’s been a rotten year and I’m happy to see it in the rearview.

I have a number of goals for 2026, both on this blog, online in general, and in the real world. I’m waking up more and more to what the world feels like it is and what I feel like it should be, and there is a large gap there that, bluntly, I feel the need to do something about.

Penny for Your Thoughts, Nickel for Your Sentence

Film: Nickel Boys
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

As we approach the end of the year, I realize that if I’m going to finish my Oscar chores, I need to get on the last couple of movies I haven’t seen. I started to watch Nickel Boys a few months ago, and then dropped off. This has nothing to do with the quality of the film. It has everything to do with the fact that it feels like this country is regressing, and movies that deal with oppression, racism, and similar topics are more overwhelming than normal right now. And make no mistake—this is very much a movie about racism and civil rights.

What’s frustrating here is that in a fair and just world, it wouldn’t be that story. We’re going to spend most of our time with Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who is a promising student who appears poised for academic success. He is accepted into a study program at an HBCU, and while hitchhiking to campus, is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. When they are pulled over, Elwood, who is a minor, is accused and convicted of being the man’s accomplice. As a minor, he can’t be sent to prison, so he is instead sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.

Everyone's Autistic

Film: The Phoenician Scheme
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

Wes Anderson is one of those directors whose films are immediately recognizable. I was trying to figure out exactly what it is in terms of his composition and characters that makes his film so distinctive and I’ve finally figured it out—it’s the title of this write-up. Everyone in Wes Anderson films is autistic. In his early films, it was only some of the characters, but now, everyone in his films has got a touch of the ‘tism, and they’ve all got the same variety. It wasn’t until I finished The Phoenician Scheme that I finally understood this.

The Phoenician Scheme is mid-level Wes Anderson, and I don’t like having to say that. I tend to like Wes Anderson films pretty well, although I can only take a bit of him at a time. Now that I’ve seen this, I probably won’t watch another of his films for six or seven months. When Anderson is good, he’s really good. When he’s off, even a bit, everything feels like it falls apart. The Phoenician Scheme just never feels like it gels in the way his films normally do. It might be simply because the characters here, almost to a person, are unlikeable.

Presents Beneath the Tree

2025 has been probably the worst year of my life, and as a capper, I got COVID for Christmas, which means I’m spending the day alone, separated from my family. It also means that I’m not spending the days between Christmas and New Year’s in St. Louis with my family. This years sucks and I can’t wait for it to be gone.

On another note, it appears that at some point, 15 movies were added to the List, which (according to IMDb) is up to 1260 total entries, so I suddenly have a touch of work to do on that—I’ve seen most of them already. So I’ll be getting through few that I’m missing soon. That being the case, I’m going to suggest my yearly addition of 10 movies. I won’t include anything from 2025, but I will likely touch on 2024. As always, these are not ranked, just in the order I thought of them.

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that one of my original picks, BlacKkKlansman, has been on the 1001 List before, so I am replacing it.

Muscle Mommy

Film: Love Lies Bleeding
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on gigantic television.

I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.

It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.