I hope you enjoy the video.
Outside of the movies themselves, two events will seem to
define the year in film 2025 for me: The New York Times poll of the best 100 movies of the 21st century
and the impending takeover of Warner Bros. by… well, we don’t know just quite
yet. The former is looking back, a celebration that, despite the disruption of
seemingly every industry since the turn of the century, proves movies are still
great. The latter though leaves anxiety for
the future, the subsuming of an iconic movie studio–the legacy studio of
all legacy studios–potentially by a company whose entire modus operandi seems
to be the elimination of movie theaters altogether or potentially by another
company that appears to be steadily morphing into the media apparatus of a
fascist regime.
For what it’s worth, here’s my NYT ballot (in ranked order from left to right, top to bottom). While there are some expected entries, I find it interesting that in a few cases, I swerved with the consensus on some of the expected directors. I have the lowest ranked movie from the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson–Inside Llewyn Davis and Punch-Drunk Love, respectively–and a Spielberg (Minority Report, a movie I feel like I’m way higher on than just about anyone I know) that just sneaked onto the top 100. And while lists like these raise as many questions as they do ire amongst its readers, what can be certain is that there will always be great movies, you just have to know where to look for them. This list is a decent start.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t quickly conduct a brief in memoriam. The year began and ended with the deaths of David Lynch and Rob Reiner, two directors who couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, yet impacted the culture all the same. Two acting stalwarts of the New Hollywood era and beyond, whose stardom was matched only by their talent, Gene Hackman and Robert Redford also passed. But of course the one that hit me the most was the passing of Diane Keaton, whose face has graced the top of this very site since its inception, and whose performances are as fundamental to my understanding of American cinema as anyone who has ever stepped in front of a camera. La-dee-da.
