2025 Year-end Media List
Another year, and a look back at some of my favorite movies and books of the year. The worst-of list might be a bit longer. The books listed in italics are in progress.
MOVIES (in no particular order, date-wise)
- F1 The Movie (B)
- Frankenstein (A)
- The Night of the Hunter (A+)
- Thunder Road (A-)
- Nope (A)
- Wake Up Dead Man (A)
- Us (B)
- One Battle After Another (A+)
- Brewster McCloud (B)
- Kinds of Kindness (A)
- The Naked Gun (B)
- Highest 2 Lowest (A-)
- Family Plot (B-)
- The Koker Trilogy (A+)
- Blow-Up (A+)
- Tampopo (A+)
- Sinners (A+)
- Double Indemnity (A)
- 8 1/2 (B+)
- Lost in America (B)
- Funny Games (A+)
- The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp (A)
- The Sand Pebbles (A-)
- The Lord of the Rings, Extended version (A+)
- Get Shorty (B+)
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (D-)
- The Brutalist (A)
- Killers of the Flower Moon (A)
- TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (A+)
- The Substance ©
- Seven Men from Now (B)
- Thief (B)
- The Tall T (C+)
- Conclave (B+)
- Bowfinger (B+)
- Blow Out (A)
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (A)
- Picnic at Hanging Rock (A+)
- Chinatown (A+)
- Happy-Go-Lucky (A)
BOOKS
- William Hazlitt (biography by Duncan Wu)
- The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935-1985 (S. Christie)
- Jane Eyre (C. Brönte)
- Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Zevin)
- Everywhere Being is Dancing (Bringhurst)
- The Quilt (Tayama)
- The Wild Geese (Mori)
- What We Can Know (McEwan)
- The Little Prince (De Saint-Exupéry)
- Nocturnes (Ishiguro)
- Time and Again (Finney)
- Seven Empty Houses (Schweblin)
- In Xanadu (Dalrymple)
- Ring Lardner: Stories and other writings
- To the Lighthouse (Woolf)
- The Dog of the South (Portis)
- Antarctica (Keegan)
- Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)
- Cuba Libre (Elmore Leonard)
- The Hunted (Elmore Leonard)
- The Fools in Town are on Our Side (Thomas)
- Bullet Park (Cheever)
- Speedboat (Adler)
- M31 (Wright)
- Radio Free Albemuth (Dick)
- The War Against Cliche (Amis)
- Kafka: The Complete Stories
- The Guide (Narayan)
- The Wager (Grann)