Happy New Year! At some point in 2025, it accidentally became my year of movies. I normally prefer to watch movies with friends, but I started watching movies on my own, so I got to see things I couldn't wrangle my friends into watching.
I had 67 first time watches in 2025! I know that's not a lot, but I usually average closer to 10, so it was really exciting for me (I also rewatched several movies I've previously seen). I fell in love with so many films, new and old. I felt like I rediscovered my love of movie magic.
My 67 films under the cut, with favorites bolded:
Anatomy of a Fall
Sing Sing
12 Angry Men
The Substance
Bring Her Back
Talk To Me
Lost Highway
Blue Velvet
Mississippi Masala
The Shrouds
Weapons
El Haimoune (Wanderers in the Desert)
Conclave
Night of the Hunter
O Brother Where Art Thou
Kairo (Pulse)
The Birdcage
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Cuckoo
Red Rooms
Sinners
Companion
Flow
Challengers
Mickey 17
Saint Omer
The First Omen
V/H/S Beyond
Waiting for Guffman
Savageland
Black Christmas
Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage)
The Devils
Kwaidan
The Red Shoes
Haxan
Strange Days
Solvent
In the Mouth of Madness
The Empty Man
Sorry, Baby
Onibaba
Rashomon
The House That Jack Built
Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love
The Thing (1982)
Frankenstein (2025)
Glass Onion
Throne of Blood
One Battle After Another
The Blackcoat's Daughter
Dead Ringers
La Chimera
Singing in the Rain
The Taste of Things
Viy
Black Narcissus
Prometheus
The Company of Wolves
28 Years Later
Perfect Blue
Wake Up Dead Man
Messiah of Evil
Casablanca
Working Girls
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!)
The Savage Hunt of King Stakh (Дикая охота короля Стаха)
Assembling my collection of monographs and books on photography. 🥰
From the top:
The Americans by Robert Frank • On Photography by Susan Sontag • Diane Arbus by Aperture • America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait by Aperture • Paper and Light: The Calotype in France and Great Britain 1839-1870 by Richard R. Brettell • The Negative Book Two by Ansel Adams • Let the Sun Beheaded Be by Gregory Halpern • In The American West by Richard Avedon • Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler • At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women by Sally Mann • Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems • Beneath The Roses by Gregory Crewdson • Somnyama Ngonyama/Hail the Dark Lioness by Zanele Muholi • and The Beautiful Smile by Nan Goldin.
About 7 years ago I was shown a photograph in my seminar class, and because I'm the world's biggest idiot I didn't write down who took it or anything, and I haven't been able to find the photograph since. I was SO sure it was a Torbjørn Rødland photo, and I know that we looked at a Rødland photo in the same class (the girls on the motorcycle one) and visually the style and composition is similar, but I've been trying on and off for years to search through Rødland's body of work for this image to no avail. I have no idea who it could be otherwise.
And I have such a hyper-specific anecdote to tell about my professor and this photo, and it would really help to have a visual aid when I tell it.
It's also not cool to use a smartphone to take a picture. It's so fucking lame. It's no longer making anything. Coolness requires a sense of the tactile.
Unpopular opinion apparently but it isn't enough to potentially boycott any show or movie or book made with AI, it isn't enough to support the digital artists who don't use it. You have to also kill the demand for AI. Stop asking the chatbots questions or plugging things into midjourney for jokes- I though we all understood by now the danger of just doing something "ironically". Stop reblogging or sharing random "aesthetic" pictures that are AI. If you can't recognize them, learn how.
I'll really be out here thinking I'm normal and then a piece of media will bring up the invention of photography and I will literally vibrate out of my bones and have to pace to calm down.
