2025 at the Movies

I’m less enthusiastic about 2025 than any of the three previous years I’ve covered for The Goods, though the release calendar was not completely absent achievement or flavor. For example, I fell head over heels for Twinless, the funky thriller-comedy-drama by emerging writer-director-star James Sweeney. Meanwhile, Omnes Films continue to bat 1.000 in vibes-based larks, here with Carson Lund’s baseball hangout Eephus.

The two awards seasons heavy hitters, Sinners and One Battle After Another, both made my personal Top 10, and the theme I choose to extract from them as a trend for all of 2025 is that many movies this year take daring mid-movie swings, transforming from one tone to another. It’s true in both those films (moreso in Sinners, but OBAA has a time jump and shift a half hour in), and also true of plenty of 2025’s other memorable outings; indies especially: Oh Hi, Borderline, Sorry Baby, and Twinless fit the description among movies I liked. Opus and Eddington fit movies I didn’t.

So, yeah: many good and interesting movies intermingled with gallons of mediocrity and a few dollops of real slop. Same as it ever was. But, through it all, not much made me want to sing from the rooftops, and it was the first year since 2022 I really struggled to come up with 20 movies I loved for my Top 10 and Next 10.

Here’s to a 2026 that remains unpredictable and dynamic but gives me a little bit more to cheer for.

2025 on the Site

In 2025, I launched indie shorts review journal The New Cinephile which I plan to pick up with more steam later in 2026. On The Goods, I continued my looks at both classic films (including a few entries in my interminable tour of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die) and new releases.

I started a look at Bong Joon Ho’s filmography, and I made a (misguided?) detour into Doctor Dolittle adaptations during the summer. In the fall, I spent some quality time with an unheralded director you probably haven’t heard of named Alfred Hitchcock, whom I officially inducted into my Director’s Index Tier 1 inner circle.

From guest writers front, A.N. Milne finished their terrific, in-depth, and very popular analysis of TV series Gangs of London. (Speaking of TV coverage, the world quakes with anticipation about whether I’ll write any more about Community.)

Podcast episodes now have a home page with extra context and links to referenced supplemental media. One last site improvement of 2025: my friend Isaac helped me build out an awards tracker for film review pages. Check out the bottom of The Woman in the Yard review for an example.

2025 on the Podcast

For a sixth year, The Goods: A Film Podcast continued its mostly-weekly coverage of films both beloved and forgotten. We passed 250 episodes before this writing. (As already mentioned, episodes now get dedicated pages on this site.)

Our theme months in 2025 were “Dad Month” in February when we discussed films about fatherhood, then “Maxi/Mini-Month” in August  when we discussed movies featuring things significantly bigger or smaller than they are usually found.

During 2025, we had several returning guests join us, including the one-of-a-kind Gargus, Gavin from Sects, Lies, and Videotape, and my brother Will, plus a few fresh faces, including Mitch from The Movie Call Podcast and Colton, my raconteur high school buddy and former co-blogger.

Come give us a listen!

2025 Films in Review

• Year in Film: 2025 – Main hub for 2025 coverage
• The B.A.D.S. by The Goods, 2025 – My “awards show” wrap-up
• The Top 10 Movies of 2025

Masterpieces Reviewed

• Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
• Psycho (1960)
• Superbad (2007)

Rankings and Lists

• Every High School Musical Series Song, Ranked

Site/Personal Milestones

• Overhaul of the Review Index
• Announcing a project: The New Cinephile
• My daughter and I wrote another book!

Some Numbers

• The Goods published 126 film reviews in 2025 (plus some TV episode reviews both by me and another author).
• The average “Is It Good?” rating for those reviews was a 5.04 (or a “Good”)
• The Goods had 86k readers in 2025 (almost 3x more than 2024). Thanks for stopping by!
• And those readers left 485 comments (including my own)
  • Thanks especially to regular readers and commenters Hunter, ED, Mitch, Thrash, and Nate. A comment, even a small one or a disagreement, makes my day.

• The Goods: A Film Podcast released 47 episodes
• The Goods: A Film Podcast had its episodes downloaded in podcast apps 4.5k times
  • We also picked up 6.7k listeners on YouTube, the first year that number surpassed podcast app downloads
• According to my Letterboxd, I watched 308 feature-length films, 28 short films, and 4 mini-series in 2025.

A Few Memorable Reviews

• Superbad (2007)
  • “Gun to your head, what is the funniest film of your lifetime? … No comedy from my teen years and young adulthood has stood the test of time better than Superbad. It is a film that always has jokes I’ve forgotten about, and even the ones I remember still make me laugh.”
• Psycho (1960)
  • “Psycho remains the ultimate gateway drug for horror-skeptic movie lovers and an enduring summit for the converted. It’s one of the cinema’s great arguments for how style, structure, and story can surface the things we’d rather not dredge up.”
• Beach Party (1963)
  • “When Brian Wilson died last week, a couple of film fans I know turned to Love & Mercy, the biopic about the legendary musician. But my brain went straight to Beach Party.”
• The Great White Silence (1924)
  • “Nanook of the North is the more famous of prototype documentaries of the era, and it’s an obvious comparison to this because both capture life in the intense cold. But The Great White Silence is the better film in every meaningful sense: richer, bolder, sadder, more visually striking, and more honest in tone.”
• Wish (2023)
  • “A couple of months ago, I visited Disney World in Orlando. While we were at Epcot, I noticed a sign that said: ‘Meet Asha – Right Now!’ I looked up and there was just one person in line. My first thought was ‘who is Asha?'”

Looking Back

• 2024 Annual Recap
• 2023 Annual Recap
• 2022 Annual Recap

Looking Ahead

• Goals for 2026

Please submit one or more questions by Sunday, May 24 and we will answer them on air! The topic can be anything: movies, the podcast, writing reviews, something else in our lives.

Here’s the link to submit a question. We hope to hear from you!

Submit questions for The Goods mailbag episode

• Dedicated pages for podcast episodes – If you’ve been hanging around you’ve surely seen these episode pages for The Goods: A Film Podcast! It includes links to the episode’s MP3, YouTube posting, and Podbean page. (Every episode is also on most podcast platform.) I also include supplemental media referenced in the discussion and shared on the podcast Discord. As noted in my annual goals, I’ll be trying to make pages for the whole podcast’s archive by the end of 2026. (Sorry, everyone using RSS. I know you exist thanks to Google Analytics.)
• JustWatch links in reviews – Nothing I do for The Goods, written or recorded, generates a dime of revenue. It’s a total time and money sink that I do because I love movies. I have no plans to introduce ads or make a Patreon or anything like that. But I did integrate a “JustWatch” widget with links to the bottom of some reviews (each one has to be turned on manually, so I only do it when I remember to) to show where movies are streaming. My wife says they don’t look too spammy, and I think they are genuinely helpful, but if you disagree on either of those points, let me know. (See for example: Bottom of Rear Window review.)
• The Goods Hall of Fame – I’ve always had a page in the Review Index listing all movies for which I’ve bestowed a full-length Tour De Good review, but a few months ago I spruced it up to give each movie a screencap and pull-quote.
• Award & Ranking mentions in reviews – A few months ago I added support for reviews to include their selections for various overwrought rankings and award shows. Check out the bottom of The Substance review for a particularly busy example! (Major thanks to my pal Isaac for helping me populate the awards data on the site.)
• A new Tier 1 director index! – Once I’ve written 3+ full-length reviews for a director, I add them my Directors Index (remember that? check it out if you don’t!), grouped into three tiers based on how much I adore their work and how accomplished their career is. Well, I finally crossed that threshold for Mr. H himself this past October, and just got around to making his Directors Index page. Hitchcock joins Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson, and Richard Linklater in Tier 1. Oh, and Paul Feig gets a Tier 3 page. (Bumped up to Tier 2 if I ever review Freaks and Geeks.)

Hope 2026 is treating y’all ok!

Watch 300 feature films

Someone asked me last year why watching a given number of movies is a “goal” I set every year. Shouldn’t enjoying art be done for love and joy rather than achievement? Doesn’t overdosing on the medium in order to fulfill a metric diminish its pleasure?

That person was probably right!

Publish at least 200 reviews, lists, essays, or podcast episodes

This feels like a good number!

Spotlight 30 different filmmakers on The New Cinephile

I’ve taken a break on The New Cinephile, but I did find it genuinely rewarding so I’d like to pick it back up soon.

Finish posting the podcast archive on this site and on YouTube

Last year I finally got around to designing a format for podcast episodes on the site. I’d like to go back and post all episodes from our archive, including making sure all are on YouTube (our Podbean integration with YouTube is very flaky).

Complete (or make significant headway on) at least 5 open-ended review projects

I have a lot of open-ended review series that I need to wind down. I’m planning an audit of these in the near future.

Goal: Watch 300 feature films

Result: I watched 308 feature films

Goal: Publish at least 200 reviews, lists, essays, or podcast episodes

Result: I published 204 things

By my count, 148 reviews, lists, or essays for The Goods, 9 reviews for The New Cinephile, and 47 episode of The Goods: A Film Podcast.

Goal: Start an indie film project (blog/newsletter)

Result: I founded The New Cinephile

I had a really fun time kicking off The New Cinephile but lost steam on it in the fall as my life as a parent got busier.

Goal: Improve representation of the podcast on the site

Result: I began posting podcast episodes here

Goal: Collaborate

Result: I dunno!

This was a poorly defined goal. We had several guests on the podcast and grew our Discord community. I published a few guest posts and corresponded with several filmmakers and writers. But that’s about as far as I got. If you have ideas, let me know.

2026 goals coming soon!

This ballot I really tried to err on the side of movies that spoke to me personally when selecting and ranking nominees. Goofy little things that lit up my heart place better than some of the awards magnets.

A couple of rules/reminders: I have not yet seen many movies I predict would place in several of these categories. In the feature-length categories (animated/doc/international), I only nominate if I passed them at “Good” or higher; hence some blanks, as I haven’t seen enough to fill all five spots. Feature-length is 40+ mins for OFCS (relevant for Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, which qualifies by 18 seconds.)

One more proviso: Last year, I bent myself in a pretzel trying to independently reason what roles were Lead vs. Supporting. This year, I’m just deferring to FYC campaigns; though I’m subject to change my mind on this.

(Pictured: KPop Demon Hunters)

Best Picture

1. Twinless
2. Eephus
3. The Phoenician Scheme
4. Sorry, Baby
5. One Battle After Another
6. Weapons
7. Sinners
8. F1
9. Sacramento
10. The Woman in the Yard

Best Animated Feature

1. KPop Demon Hunters
2. Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical
3. Zootopia 2
4. The Bad Guys 2
5. —

Best Director

1. Wes Anderson – The Phoenician Scheme
2. Paul Thomas Anderson – One Battle After Another
3. James Sweeney- Twinless
4. Ryan Coogler – Sinners
5. Zach Cregger – Weapons

Best Lead Actor

1. Dylan O’Brien – Twinless
2. Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon
3. Paul Walter Hauser – The Luckiest Man in America
4. Michael Angarano – Sacramento
5. Benicio Del Toro – The Phoenician Scheme

Best Lead Actress

1. Eva Victor – Sorry, Baby
2. Danielle Deadwyler – The Woman in the Yard
3. Julia Roberts – After the Hunt
4. Elizabeth Olsen – Eternity
5. Molly Gordon – Oh, Hi!

Best Supporting Actor

1. Josh O’Connor – Wake Up Dead Man
2. Benicia Del Toro – One Battle After Another
3. Michael Cera – The Phoenician Scheme
4. Paul Rudd – Friendship
5. Andrew Scott – Blue Moon

Best Supporting Actress

1. Blake Lively – Another Simple Favor
2. Teyana Taylor – One Battle After Another
3. Aisling Franciosi – Twinless
4. Maya Erskine – Sacramento
5. Amber Midthunder – Novocaine

Best Ensemble & Casting

1. One Battle After Another
2. Sinners
3. The Phoenician Scheme
4. Eephus
5. Weapons

Best Original Screenplay

1. Twinless
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. Sinners
4. Sacramento
5. Friendship

Best Adapted Screenplay

(oof)

1. One Battle After Another
2. Wake Up Dead Man
3. Blue Moon
4. Superman
5. Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical

Best Editing

1. F1
2. One Battle After Another
3. Twinless
4. Drop
5. The Woman in the Yard

Best Cinematography

1. The Woman in the Yard
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. One Battle After Another
4. Twinless
5. The Surfer

Best Original Score

1. Sinners
2. The Phoenician Scheme
3. One Battle After Another
4. F1
5. After the Hunt

Best Production Design

1. The Phoenician Scheme
2. Frankenstein
3. Sinners
4. Mickey 17
5. Eternity

Best Costume Design

1. The Phoenician Scheme
2. Frankenstein
3. Sinners
4. Another Simple Favor
5. The Woman in the Yard

Best Makeup & Hairstyling

1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Weapons
4. Blue Moon
5. The Luckiest Man in America

Best Sound Design

1. F1
2. Eephus
3. Sinners
4. Mickey 17
5. One Battle After Another

Best Visual Effects

1. F1
2. Mickey 17
3. One Battle After Another
4. Superman
5. The Monkey

Best Choreography (Dance & Stunt)

1. Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires
2. Love Hurts
3. One Battle After Another
4. Sinners
5. Eddington

Best Film Not in the English Language

(Less than 25% English)

1. Misericordia
2. —
3. —
4. —
5. —

Best Documentary

1. Not Just a Goof
2. —
3. —
4. —
5. —

Best Debut Feature

(Achievement in Writing and/or Direction)

1. Carson Lund – Eephus
2. Eva Victor – Sorry, Baby
3. Andrew DeYoung – Friendship
4. Alex Russell – Lurker
5. Lawrence Lamont – One of Them Days

All Princess Gracie wants is to be an amazing big sister. How did she end up trapped in the dark forest?

When Gracie wanders into the dangerous woods near the castle looking for a magical flower to be part of a gift for her new sibling, she finds a lot more than a flower: a walking skeleton, two-headed creatures, and a battle with evil monsters. Can Gracie learn to be kind and caring as she tries to foil Greena the witch’s latest evil plans?

You can get the book as a paperback from Amazon. We also have a free PDF & EPUB download of the book on our web site.

• Get the paperback on Amazon
• Get the free PDF or EPUB download

If you missed the first book , you can also order as a paperback on Amazon, or get the free PDF or EPUB (scroll down a little here).

We hope you’ll check it out, or maybe pass it on to a reader in your life! Thanks, and have a great Tuesday!

I’ve had a couple of bad breaks and bouts of discouragement in the past few weeks (nothing serious; just disappointment). To shake out of my rut and find a positive outlet, I decided to pursue an idea I’ve been considering for a year or two: a review journal focused on small releases by emerging and diverse creators.

As with any new project, I’m liable to iterate, pivot, or even abandon it at any point. But here’s my current vision:

What is The New Cinephile and how is it different from The Goods?

• The New Cinephile is a journal of reviews for features and shorts created by independent and student filmmakers
• No review scores
• Writing tone is designed as a celebration of fresh ideas and voices; thus I’ll only write about stuff that spoke to me in one way or another, and I’ll do so from a perspective of cheering on bold choices and interesting ideas I liked rather than poking holes or holding against the cast or crew any craft or choices that didn’t work for me. (Frankly, the positivity is part of the point of this for me; I want to provide validation and platform for emerging filmmakers who are out there grinding and trying stuff.)
• Unlike The Goods, I’m trying to make sure I include some diversity in the filmmakers I cover (women, international filmmakers, people of color, etc.)
• Here’s a sample: Robotica (2024) by Isabella Ivos – The machine never stops
• I don’t know how often I’ll publish reviews there
• I definitely won’t cross-post every review here, but if I maintain publishing volume there, I might consider posting occasional (e.g. monthly) roundups here
• Feel free to check it out and pass it along; or not if you’re not interested! It’s something different for sure
• If you know any student or indie filmmakers looking to get feedback or a possible review of their films, short or feature-length, please forward them to me. They can reach me at dan.stalcup@gmail.com

You can visit The New Cinephile here: NewCinephile.com

Thanks, and happy watching!

Pictured: John Cassavetes’s film Shadows, which the book Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes by John Pierson cites as the first independent film.

2024 at the Movies

Unless I win the lottery and can quit my day job and hire a podcast editor, I will never have enough time or mental bandwidth to see and review every movie that catches my curiosity, so anything I write here has the built-in asterisk of “well, of what I’ve seen.”

My first instinct towards 2024’s film output is disappointment. One of its movies, The Substance, will make my best of decade rankings, but beyond that, I’m not so sure. A couple of films exceeded my expectations by quite a bit and will be in the mix, too (Here, Flow). For an hour or so, I really thought Snack Shack would get there, too.

But the older I get and the more movies I watch, the more my mind slips away from complete “best” works and towards flashes of personality and strange charms and surprising images. I think of Jeremy Strong’s humanity in The Apprentice, of the Psycho house in MaXXXine, of Taron Egerton running in Carry-On, and of Adam Driver saying “the riches of my Emersonian mind” in Megalopolis, and my heart stirs. I think of the rice cooker in All We Imagine as Light, of the diarrhea in Incoming, and of “Creature’s Love Theme” from Lisa Frankenstein, and I shed a small tear. Film may be more fractured and compromised as an art form than ever, but it still offers delights and surprises for those willing to watch.

If I had to draw some themes from the films I saw, here is what they would be: Run-times of art films and awards contenders are increasingly bloated. All of the Best Picture nominees eclipsed 2 hours, most by more than a half hour. The Brutalist stretched to more than 3.5 hours, though it at least gave us an intermission to stretch our legs and relieve our bladders.

On the blockbuster front, superheroes are less dominant than they have been in decades. Letterboxd cites only one film among the year’s 25 most popular that is a comic book movie; you need to go back almost 20 years to 2007 to replicate that feat (2010 if you limit it to DC and Marvel adaptations).

Late career bold statements from the the gray-haired generation of greats is another recurring theme of this year and the past couple: on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s Fabelmans and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon from the past two years, we experienced the astonishing works of Robert Zemeckis’s Here and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in 2024. I had varied reactions to these movies, but I’ll continue to celebrate our masters as long as I have the chance to.

2024 on the Site

In 2024, I completed a handful of director retrospectives (Alexander Payne, Jonathan Glazer, Denis Villeneuve, Matthew Vaughn) and kicked off another (George Miller). I also reviewed the filmographies of a few smaller-name directors either early in or towards the middle of their careers (Jane Schoenbrun, Radio Silence, Jeymes Samuel, Hannah Marks). Additionally, I ever-so-slowly continued my look at mid-1920s cinema via the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list.

Throughout 2024, I worked on overhauling my Review Index. I ultimately finished the overhaul in early 2025. This includes new indexes for Directors and Series as a more structured version of “Review Projects.”

The Goods welcomed back sci-fi author Andrew Milne as a contributor wrapping up his coverage of Gangs of London. We also had a new guest writer, JV, write about Red Rooms.

2024 on the Podcast

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future; and so does The Goods: A Film Podcast. We’re in our fifth year of recording mostly-weekly. We’ve passed 200 episodes as of this writing and are coming up on 350 movies reviewed, as we sometimes hit more than an movie per episode. Our theme months in 2024 were “Debut Month” in February when we discussed noted directors’ first works, then “Month Month” in September when we discussed movies with months in their titles. Come give us a listen!

2024 Films in Review

• Year in Film: 2024 – Main hub for 2024 coverage
• The B.A.D.S. by The Goods, 2024 – My “awards show” wrap-up
• The Top 10 Movies of 2024
• 2024 Mini-Review Roundup – A rapid-fire hit on 2024 movies I watched but didn’t get around to reviewing

Masterpieces Reviewed

• Blade Runner (1982)

Rankings and Lists

• Alexander Payne’s Movies Ranked
• Matthew Vaughn’s Movies Ranked
• Jonathan Glazer’s Movies Ranked (7 Ways)
• Denis Villeneuve’s Movies Ranked
• 101 Images from La Roue
• Top 10 Scenes in Rudy

Site/Personal Milestones

• My daughter and I published a book!
• Goals for 2024
• Looking Back: Goals for 2024

Some Numbers

• The Goods published 107 film reviews in 2024 (plus 1 film review by another author, plus several TV episode reviews by another author)
• The average “Is It Good?” rating for those reviews was a 4.85 (or a low “Good”)
• The Goods had 30k readers in 2024 (~7x more than 2023). (Many arrived seeking out Andrew’s Gangs of London reviews.) Thanks for stopping by!
• And those readers left 261 comments (including my own)
  • Thanks especially to regular readers and commenters Hunter, ED, and Andrew. A comment, even a small one or a disagreement, makes my day.
• The Goods: A Film Podcast released 45 episodes
• The Goods: A Film Podcast had its episodes downloaded 4,378 times
  • We also picked up several hundred listeners on YouTube
• According to my Letterboxd, I watched 278 feature-length films, 24 short films, and 2 mini-series in 2024.

A Few Memorable Reviews

• Blade Runner (1982)
  • “Whether your creator is a god in the sky or a man in a tower, whether our lifespan is four years of several decades, we all perish. We are servants to mortality. True freedom is not hunting down your maker, like Roy does, but taking that limited time and making it into something beautiful and of your own vision, like plain paper folded into origami.”
• Ham on Rye (2019)
  • “I’m hesitant to even publish this review with so high a score and such enthusiasm because Ham on Rye truly may have an audience of one in me. I am certain that this is a film that will not work for the large majority of watchers. But it is immediately a Certified Dan Classic, a cursed little gem I’ll watch whenever I’m in a teen movie rut and want to see the genre’s insides delicately scooped out and put on display.”
• La Roue (1923)
  • “Beyond the dubious extancy of his ambitious opi, the reason that Gance is such a mythic figure is that his films are the ne plus ultra of grand ambition and tragic destiny: Each epic he directed is titanic in length, scope, and melodrama. Many of the creative forces involved in La Roue lived dramatic lives and died dramatic deaths, and the production swirled with its own mythology.”
• Night Swim (2024)
  • “Q: What is Night Swim about?
    A: It is about a haunted pool.
    Q: Sorry, a what? I must have misheard you.
    A: A haunted pool. Like, a swimming pool.”

Looking Back

• 2023 Annual Recap
• 2022 Annual Recap

Looking Ahead

• Goals for 2025

Watch 300 feature films

My heart still wants to aim for 365; the appeal of the 1.00 per day average is strong. But 300 would be a slight improvement on last year, so let’s go for that.

Publish at least 200 reviews, lists, essays, or podcast episodes

I got nowhere near my goal of 200 pieces of writing last year, so let’s throw podcast episodes into the count, too. Consistency is key. (Checks output in 2025 so far.) Hmmm.

Start an indie film project (blog/newsletter)

I’m going to write more about what I have in mind for this, and why I want to do it, within a month or two.

Improve representation of the podcast on the site

The Goods: A Film Podcast is nearing 200 episodes and has passed 300 films reviews, as captured in Brian’s outstanding Letterboxd list. I’d like to better archive the podcast on the site since it’s a different outlet for my reviews.

Collaborate

Host guests on the pod. Invite guest writers to the site. Read and comment on friends’ writing. Maybe join another critic society or group. I broadly like and appreciate people, and want to make that more central in my engagement with movies!

I know this post comes on the tail of significant amounts navel-gazing and wrap-up and not much review writing, so thanks for the patience. Cheers to you all!