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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #72. Plainclothes (dir. Carmen Emmi, 2025)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #73. The Living End (dir. Gregg Araki, 1992)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

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Will you listen: 48 Cameras – Chosen Songs (2018)

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #74. Darkness, Darkness, Burning Bright (dir. Gaëlle Rouard, 2022)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

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Will you listen: Croz Boyce – Croz Boyce (2026)

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #75. Trafic (dir. Jacques Tati, 1971)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

Tati's penultimate feature film is less consistently magnetic, but there's tons to enjoy, particularly in terms of brief observational moments showing people doing quirky things in and around their cars. These collections of multiple low-key scenes play more effecting than, say, one longer scene, where Tati's protagonist is suspended on a tree at night. Its framing as, maybe intentionally, the film's centerpiece adds to its odd rhythm.

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #76. Where Is the Friend's House (dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

Adults are frustrating assholes. Ahmadpour's may be my all-time favorite child film performance.

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Will you listen: 7038634357 - Neo Seven (2023)

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #77. Goodbye First Love (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

It's a perfect pairing to "Mon oncle," as it is another case of a filmmaker with one work (Bergman Island) that I adore to the extent that it casts a heavy shadow over their earlier titles. Like Babygirl, this film doesn't have outstanding cinematography or editing, its actors are fine, but the story is incredibly engaging and told in a sparse way. Hansen-Løve's films share emotional resonances with Joachim Trier, particularly their early 2010s output, which zooms in on their protagonists who undergo issues that will either kill them or they outgrow them. This film is the case of the latter.

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #78. Mon oncle (dir. Jacques Tati, 1958)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

Tati's masterpiece Playtime was my first encounter with the filmmaker, which is to slight detriment of his other films. Mon oncle is the one I'd heard the most, for years, and, from a distance, it seemed infantile and cozy, which is exactly what I didn't want from cinema throughout and beyond my 20s. This film demonstrates Tati's unique style in its quirky basics: gag-oriented, buoyed by exquisite production design, intelligently staged.

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #79. The Big Fix (dir. Jeremy Kagan, 1978)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

There's a weird connection I have to Dreyfuss' screen persona. I grew aware of him through some of his 1990s output, my favorite part of which is cringy, underwritten, yet kinetic Krippendorf's Tribe, a silly kind-of slapstick comedy featuring Lily Tomlin, teenage Natasha Lyonne, and a hefty dose of blackfacing. I hated the sappiness Mr Holland's Opus, I didn't connect with the autopilot antics of What About Bob? (despite Julie Haggerty!), I fell asleep while watching Spielberg's Always (despite my undying love for Holly Hunter). Then there came the big hits, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I liked fine. Dreyfuss started growing on me. He grew a lot as a supporting player in amazing Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead; he kept growing after I saw him in a lovely small role in Postcards from the Edge. I'd never heard of The Big Fix, I didn't expect anything, and it became my favorite of his roles, to a great extent due to amazing chemistry he has with the young actors playing his sons, Abraham, and, most importantly, Anspach, who's riveting in her small though pivotal role. This film has the looks and loose feel of 1970s Altman's: a noir that is a comedy that is a drama that occasionally employs a sketch structure, courtesy of scene-stealing Rita Karin. I am always excited to see Bonnie Bedelia, but she doesn't get much to do.

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Film after film: Diamantino (dir. Gabriel Abrantes, Daniel Schmidt, 2018)

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Film after film: Die dritte Generation (dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1979)

I just cannot ever finish this film, weirdly.

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Will you listen: Cate Le Bon – Reward (2019)

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Will you listen: Camila Fuchs - Heart Pressed Between Stones (2018)

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #80. Kontinental ’25 (dir. Radu Jude, 2025)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

Jude's follow-up to his two formally exciting and sprawling cringe comedies continues his cacophonous and raunchy criticism of contemporary Romania, here epitomized by Cluj-Napoca. Jude draws lines of causality between rampant socio-economic class discrepancies and social exclusion with the city's ugly contemporary architecture, typical of the post-Soviet-bloc nation-states, particularly in mid-size and small towns. Public property gets privatized, old tenement houses are demolished, and their elderly tenants are displaced or, as is the case of the film's other protagonist commit suicides that no one seems to notice or care about. Those who do, like the film's protagonist, are stuck in their own discomfort. It's a lean film, sometimes to its slight detriment, with one impressive visual gimmick and a lot of talking, full of bitter one-liners and dirty jokes.

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Favorite Films Watched in 2025: #81. Babygirl (dir. Helena Reijn, 2024)

I watched 103 great films in 2025. This is their breakdown.

I think of lists, such as this one, as ranking and programming cases. Thinking in terms of the latter through sets of five titles grouped together in single screenings, I immediately suspect that there may be one recent U.S. indie too many in one set (see: #83). But then I also think: what a great palate-cleanser this one is! Babygirl is a rare case of a mainstream narrative and formal structure, anchored by lively lead performances by Kidman and Dickinson, both of whom are relationally kinetic. There's nothing super special about this film apart from its watchability and pleasant emotional-sexual honesty. Banderas' second appearance on this list, not his last.