2025 Bagged and Tagged

by Klon January xx, 2026

See my Top 20 movies of the year on Letterboxd.

The withered grey old man named The Year 2025 has disintegrated into dust and blown away in the wind, but not before turning the hourglass over to the suckling babe called 2026, so ripe with life it hasn’t even dirtied its diaper. And I for one am ready to watch that baby rapidly age and grow so that month by month we can observe the hideous deformation that occurs during the human lifespan. But today we consider the doddering codger 2025 that lay dead before us.

I don’t (but I do) keep up with current events - they’re bad and knowing about them makes me a worse person. I keep up with MOVIES because I like to escape current events. I’m a pretty simple dolt that way. So just what did I watch in 2025 that helped distract and amuse me? As always there were instant favorites, total flops, and everything in between.

For a few years we’ve had a trend in popular cinema where consciousness could be partitioned off from physical reality. The idealized self traveling throughout a multiverse, body swapping, time loops, souls on a flash drive, doppelgangers, non player characters, and clones. Movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Barbie, The Substance, Us and Get Out, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse or many of the Marvel movies seemed to be at least partly examining the questions that arise when we live our lives online. While these kinds of movies were still popular in 2025, this feels like the year that wave crashed and left us on the shore. We’re very officially in the post-2020 cinema era, so many movies are about how loneliness and isolation warp us and tear us apart or how hard it is to find togetherness.

The world got weird in 2016, but it really cracked in 2020. You probably had to finally unfollow your ex’s fine-ass yoga instructor once she started giving her kids horse dewormer instead of the COVID vaccine or maybe you thought it was kinda cool when your cousin’s best friend put truck nuts and coal rollers on his jacked up F-150 and posted mud bogging videos, but you had to draw the line when he joined the Proud Boys. Now we’re five years down the line you kinda miss all those folks you left behind and you don’t get together with your friends as much ..because … you just don’t. You got out of the habit and started some new habit like podcasting. And if this isn’t how your last decade or so felt, then you know someone that went through it and filmmakers, from the underground to the blockbusters, are finally catching up to these stories and processing them in some interesting ways.

The most obvious example of this trend is Ari Aster’s Eddington, a dark comedy about a small town dealing with COVID during the height of the 2020 lockdown. It tries to approach that time period with a detached “we’re making fun of everyone” style of humor that falls flat because they forgot to actually be funny. Maybe the times are just too dark for dark comedy, but even the dramatic parts felt convoluted and forced. This ends in a gruesome shootout that seems to be making visual references to first person shooter video games, but without anyone to root for, where's the suspense? Still, there’s something to be said for attempting to portray the heated, confusing moment of the lockdown, an event many of us experienced online.

A better movie about a small town in the grip of disaster was Meat Machine from the hardest working man in the underground, director Jeffrey Garcia. Lithuania has gotten a hold of a nuclear bomb and they’re dropping it on Reedville Texas because “Reedville sucks balls.” The president of the US (played by folk artist George Zupp) is a total dipshit and all of his top aides are working around the clock on the dumbest side-quests to prevent the catastrophe. The people of Reedville are totally unaware and carry on their lives abusing each other and themselves to a point where you find yourself agreeing with the Lithuanians.

I’ve watched a lot of newer low/no budget movies that use the shot on video look and most of the time it’s used as a cover because the filmmakers aren’t trying very hard, “hey it’s SOV, what did you expect??” But Meat Machine is epic in scope! It’s like a 70s disaster movie but no one knows they’re in danger, everyone’s huffing flea powder and no one’s coming to the rescue. There’s a huge cast with a ton of interconnected storylines, a musical number, tons of homemade special effects, buckets full of laffs and gallons of shit, puke and pus. Underneath the disgusting layers of phlegm there’s a sensitivity, characters that are in a losing battle with the horrors of the world. Lines like “do you know how many loads I had to swallow to pay for this hotel room?” are undeniably caring.

As a contrast to small town isolation, a few films dealt with community solidarity. Eephus is a sports movie where the conflict turns from who-will-win-the-game to can games be played just for the sake of playing them in an ever changing world. It’s the last game being played on a small town rec league baseball field before it’s demolished to make way for a new school. Neither team is favored in this story, there’s no underdog, no heroes, no villains, the game has no stakes. Through the innings the external motivations and organizing agents begin to peel away, one coach has to leave for a family obligation, fans go home, the umpires give up, even the lights for the field won’t come on as the sun goes down. All that’s left are the players who want to play the game and they do what it takes to see it through. There are so few times in life when we know something is really over and we need to hold it as tight as we can. I don’t like phony nostalgia and this starts out with all the old stuff that’s truly meaningless like vintage cars and fake ads for made up local restaurants, but just like baseball Eephus slowly takes over your attention to the point that you’re willing to watch it in the dark. Who needs the fireworks?

One of my favorite community solidarity movies of the year was Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, where a group of leftist radical terrorists are forced into a corner by perversions of institutional force. The structure of this group is diverse and non-heirarchical, with built-in safeguards to allow it to continue when members are inevitably flipped or taken out. Contrast this with the conservative elitists that are willing to use violence against their own to preserve their perceived integrity.

But flipping on your friends and family isn’t always an option as we learn in Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry’s RATS! Another Texas based underground laugh riot. Raphael is caught with a nickel bag by the overzealous and violent Officer Williams who wants him to turn informant on his drug dealing cousin Mateo who she accuses of selling nuclear warheads to Osama Bin Ladin. In the course of her investigation, Officer Williams tries to enlist a number of people to turn rat, while totally missing the obvious crimes happening all around her.

But what about your best friends? The folks that boost you up when things are their darkest, the REAL motherfuckers that will spot you a few bucks for some Checkers drive thru as long as you take them home when they get too drunk. One of Them Days is a down and out day in the life comedy like Friday, After Hours, or Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. Keke Palmer and SZA play the adorable best friends that get scammed at every turn while trying to scrape up the rent before being evicted. While Palmer and SZA are a fun duo, they don’t play up their differences the way a typical buddy comedy might, instead they allow the weirdo side characters to create all the comic tension. This movie has blood bank bloopers, big boners, bodacious booties, and a biscuit burglar, but Aziza Scott as the vengeful Berniece is a fucking one-woman riot.

An even darker examination of friendship can be found in the story of therapist Douglas Kelley as he gains the trust of imprisoned Nazi official Hermann Goring in the overwrought drama Nuremberg. While Kelly never becomes true friends with the monstrous Goring, he becomes dangerously close, and he learns that it takes little more than a network of casual contacts to spread true evil. Russell Crowe as the Nazi military commander is a tastelessly bold casting choice and in 2025 he’s the closest we have to Oliver Reed, giving a nearly perfect performance that’s lazily menacing, almost going too far into camp. This was written and directed by a Vanderbilt (as in THE Vanderbilts). I’d never heard of James Vanderbilt, but he’s been bopping around Weirdowood writing IP-related movies like one of the Spider-Mans and some Scream sequels and a couple of Sandlers, he also wrote and produced Fincher’s Zodiac. His wiki page also sez he owns the rights to The Slender Man; there’s something strange about one of the richest and most powerful Gilded-Age families “owning” a character that I assumed was an unownable folk-creature of the internet (hopefully Matt Furie will strike it rich when a Rockafeller tries to buy Pepe). It’s no surprise Vanderbilt is the biggest problem with this because almost every other element is excellent. I noticed how tasteful the clothes and sets and stuff like that were, the performances from Michael Shannon, Crowe, and Richard E Grant are all as engrossing as you’d expect, but this is pretty corny stuff. There’s lots of predictable story beats and knowing glances stand in for actual meaning. It has a lack of emotional complexity in a story that desperately needed it. I also have to put some blame on Rami Malek who plays this like he’s in a 90s romantic comedy. There were moments when they’d cut to him in the courtroom and I could’ve sworn he was about to whisper “you can do it, buddy” to Göring. This Oscar-bait kitsch is entertaining at times, but it was a hard pivot when they showed endless minutes of concentration camp footage.

The consequences of years of isolation and loneliness have made dating in 2025 almost impossible, as though it weren’t hard enough already. What seems remarkable about the 2025 romance films is their absence. Granted I haven’t been keeping up with the genre, but 2024 had high profile movies like Challengers, Anora, Love Lies Bleeding, Babygirl, We Live in Time, or even fucked up ones like Nosfertau or the Joker sequel no one watched. The films of 2025 seem to have been made by people whose Tinder bio is just pictures of them on the couch under blankets with a bio that reads “I hate this app, but whatever, I guess this is what we do now.” Celine Song’s The Materialists is an incomprehensible rich boy vs poor boy movie that makes you feel bad for wanting to feel good. It reinforces impossible romantic standards while claiming to criticize them. We’re to believe that Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans are the relatable characters and that Pedro Pascal’s character - who is as rich as a robber baron - couldn’t get a date without surgical enhancement that made him a few inches taller? The most bizarre part to me was wondering if shin implants were real - was this simply weird social commentary? Or has this trend actually taken hold among the ultra wealthy? The world has gotten so bizarre that I could believe it! It’s a shame this was so uneven because Song’s debut, Past Lives, was nearly perfect.

A film that delves into the dark side of dating much more effectively is Elric Kane’s debut The Dead Thing. It’s about a girl who’s been on the dating scene too long and she finally connects with a man who’s oh-so-easy to fall in love with. Of course he turns out to be some kind of dybbuk or ghost or haint but the crazy part is, it’s such a dick desert out there that she barely cares! I worried this would be a lame24 wannabe trauma snoozer, but it actually had sex scenes with nudity! This won’t please the black shirt horror crowd because it’s not exactly gripping or violent or even all that weird, but it brushes up against the painfulness of trying to share yourself with others in a world that wants you to detach. This could’ve just been a thriller about a jealous ghost boyfriend, but thankfully it feels more like a campfire story or a creepypasta where the ghost is a sad figure trapped in a limbo that he’s unaware of like the “vanishing hitchhiker” stories that seem to appear all over the world in one form or another. The girl’s decision to move forward in a relationship she knows is dangerous is the scariest part because that’s definitely some shit I’d do.

But for the TRUE incels, the real hopeless cases, the recessed jaw, micropenised, flabby man tittied losers, we have Fuck My Son from director Todd Rohal. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more disorienting theater experience. This movie felt ungraspable, it’s constantly and openly at war with itself. There’s a kind of gross-out movie that’s been going around, Frankie Freako, Deathstalker, or The Toxic Avenger (none of which I’ve seen), that seem rooted in Memberberry nostalgia for gorehounds. They may be wild and sick, but they’re grounded in the safe Friday night fun of childhood. Fuck My Son is groundless. I had already read the Johnny Ryan comic it was based on so I knew roughly where it would go, but I had no idea there would be AI in it. I’m agnostic about AI in movies. It’s here, people are going to use it, I don’t like it but I have no desire to debate its ethics. It’s become a taboo in the world of the arts, for some people it’s like killing the turtle in Cannibal Holocaust- an absolutely unforgivable sin. Fuck My Son seems like the kind of movie that would revel in taboo smashing, but it feels more interested in confounding the audience than shocking it. The opening “Perv-o-Vision” instruction segment used AI very obviously and for the rest of the film you find yourself wondering “is that AI? What about that?” and a glaze of disreality is spread across the whole film. There are AI advocates that think there’s something to be found in the uncanny valley of generative AI art, or they want to bend it until it breaks. I’m disinterested in those uses, it seems like just a new iteration of glitch art. Fuck My Son, however, found a use for it that disgusted me in a new way - AI on 35mm film. The effect is similar to the way 90s TV or direct-to-video movies would be shot on film but edited on video- a slight format incompatibility that makes you indescribably queasy. Imagine how much it must’ve upset the 35mm fetishists and the practical effects purists! I would say the meat friends segments were a total failure, a distracting adult swim cutesturbing kindertrauma send up of the veggietales but made out of meat. They looked sort of cool and gross, but it was just weird and seemed to only serve as a way to soften the death of the child rather than truly get at anything meaningful about the strange state of kids entertainment in the YouTube iPad era. But again, conflicts are all over this to the point where conflicts seem to be used as a kind of style- kill a kid in a gruesome way, but have her float away to a cute meat heaven; hype up 35mm and practical effects, but use AI; have an X-rating, but a revulsion towards sex; have the most recognizable actor under pounds of freak makeup; even the perv-o-vision/nude blocker gimmick is a deliberate dichotomy.

All that experiential stuff aside, this is a funny movie with funny people that has a true dark heart. It’s a kidnapping movie like The Sinful Dwarf, They Call Her One Eye, or Mother’s Day but with a mumblecore cast. George Sample III was great, he looked so familiar as the Barney Fife/Kelton the Cop character but I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else. I’d never seen anything with Tipper Newton, either, but she created a character that was both unlikeable, sympathetic, and pushed past her limits while still being truly funny and pulling off a lot of physical humor as the kidnapped mom. Robert Longstreet as the incel-coded mom is a bizarre presence who’s able to be menacing and hilarious. And of course Steve Little as the revolting son, Fabian, is somehow able to give the character heart. This had me laughing uncomfortably loud in the theater and I hope I get to see it again one day.

Fuck My Son reminds us of how important family ties are, but there were a handful of other flicks that dealt with fractured families. As a matter of fact, so many movies revolved around single parents and blended families that it would be a chore to list them, even poor Happy Gilmore had to deal with being a single father! While Sentimental Value, The Phoenician Scheme and Wake Up Dead Man all had fathers attempting to reconnect with their adult children after years in the wind. The metafictional film Invention from documentarian Courtney Stephens revolves around a woman’s attempt to learn about the final years of her recently deceased estranged father. Stephens heavily collaborated with actress Callie Hernandez who based the character’s father on her own father who’d recently died, even incorporating footage of him on local talk shows and news programs hocking health and wellness gizmos and pyramid schemes. She attempts to piece together his life by talking to his friends and business associates in loosely scripted interview segments, eventually a character begins to take shape around his absence, with only his bizarre homemade invention remaining and Callie’s character undergoes her own transformations in an incredibly patient performance. I’d like to say that Weapons had something to say about grief or family loss, but whatever message it had seemed incomprehensible, lost in pseudo-intellectual dead ends and aimless storytelling. It starts with a Larry Cohen style hook but it just can’t sustain the idea in the middle and sure, Aunt Gladys is great. Who doesn’t want to see Peggy Gravel played like Phyllis Diller? But by the time it gets to the climax I’d already lost interest and began to feel the movie grating on me. Tighten it up Cregger.

I always wind up catching one or two of the big blockbusters with my family every year and this year my favorite of the bunch was A Minecraft Movie. It wrangled with those bleak recurring 2025 themes of loneliness and isolation playfully while pointing towards hopeful solutions. Not only was it one of the most financially successful movies of the year, earning almost 1 billion dollars worldwide, it also had kids screaming along getting out of their seats and filming themselves reciting viral moments and it’s probably the best time I had in the movie theater all year. It was the most potent reminder that going to the movies is a group experience and it doesn’t have to be like church.

But top box office hits have always been the same sort of stuff for most of my life: PG-13 to G rated fantasy with light action and a few laughs, usually “based on” something. When I was managing a mom & pop video store, big hits weren’t really our bread and butter, we specialized in having a deep catalog and the ability to highlight indie and oddball stuff. I can say for sure that we would have made more money on One Battle After Another than the new Mission Impossible or Thunderbolts, but even the indie and art house hits of 2025 have seemed kind of unimpressive or disappointing. I’ve enjoyed movies from Luca Guadagnino and Celine Song in the past, but their movies After the Hunt and The Materialists respectively were among the worst I saw this year, and the films from reliable directors like Wes Anderson, Rian Johnson, Osgood Perkins, or Kelly Reichardt felt missable even if they were decent. I loved Linkletter’s Blue Moon, but is it something I’m going to revisit any time soon? Maybe 2025 -for movies- is an inflection point that we can’t see clearly because it hasn’t played out, it’s too close to be in focus. Maybe this is the 1988 of the 2020s? If you look at what was popular in 1988 you’d have never known that the independent film boom was right around the corner. What’s popular at the time never tells the whole story, anyway.