2025 Year-end Media List

30 December 2025 • list, reading, blog

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+)
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)