3. Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998). Great music, great costumes, the Citizen Kane narrative structure works: just a go-for-broke, unhinged, and somehow wholly successful film--my favorite of Haynes. The sense of despair and missed possibilities at the end really rings true to our current moment.

4. One Battle After Another (PT Anderson, 2025). Always been a PTA skeptic, but this is the movie of the year; I've already watched it twice. The balance of urgency and hilarity works brilliantly--it really gets that these fascists are evil but also ridiculous and pathetic.

5. It was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025) Panahi x 2. Finding just the right balance between comedy and horror, between formal control and spontaneity, this builds slowly and inexorably to a set of breathless finales, both narratively and morally. Is the man capable of making a bad film?

6. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, 2015). Another Panahi miracle. What seems completely spontaneous and haphazard reveals itself as intricately planned, entirely coherent, and animated by the usual fascinating tensions between fiction/non-fiction, order/disorder. And what a final shot!

7. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025). Maybe not every single bit coheres, but what a remarkably rich and dense exploration of capitalism, race, and appropriation. And it's fun as hell and made with absolute command and panache. This is what you do when you get a blank check from the studio!

8. Pressure (Horace Ove, 1976) Screenplay by the great novelist Sam Selvon. Both a wonderfully evocative slice-of-life portrait of Black British life in London and a tense and rapidly escalating tale of political awakening and radicalization. Still, of course, relevant.

9. Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004). Never been into Mann before, but this is great. Excellent performances from Cruise and Foxx, a brilliant screenplay, and gorgeous experiments in digital video. Hits the sweet spot between the abstraction of the images and the tightness of the script.

10. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000). A masterpiece of discomfort: the subject matter, the smeary early digital video, the near refusal to provide any sympathetic characters. The purest distillation of Spike Lee's cinema of provocation: prescient and unnerving.

It's that time of the year again--my list of my top 50 new-to-me films that I've watched in 2025. Counting down: 50. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024) 49. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) 48. No Way Out (Roger Donaldson, 1987) 47. Dig! (Ondi Timoner, 2004)

I realized all my favorite films from this year are, appropriately, about attempts at solidarity against fascism/violence: One Battle After Another, It Was Just an Accident, Sinners, Secret Agent. If we widen that to solidarity against sexual predation then Sorry Baby, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl too.

Because of the Christmas Adventurers Club, and the related use of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” One Battle After Another is a Christmas movie. Now added to my annual rotation.

For the online student evaluations, OSU this semester has paid an external company for an AI tool that analyzes student comments and turns them into “actionable” suggestions. It is glacially slow, absolutely useless, and barely lets you see the comments themselves! Enraging.

My book Hieroglyphic Modernisms is a mere $19.98 all this weekend thanks to @edinburghup.bsky.social ‘s sale!

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

Making my students read David Denby’s notorious review of Do the Right Thing and of the many enraging things he says the worst is him referring to Radio Raheem as a “black boy.” Bill Nunn was 36!!!

No Bears

[me, yesterday, watching the Arabic Zohran ad] dick cheney would die if he saw this

Big day at U.S. District Court in D.C. where Sean Dunn, the D.C. Sandwich Guy, is on trial for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer. Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore is on the stand narrating surveillance video of the sammie toss. 'Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,' Lairmore says.

Here’s what the #NoKings crowd looked like from the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. @colsunderground.bsky.social

Define “perfect ending”

As a long-time Paul Thomas Anderson skeptic I am pained to inform you that One Battle After Another is great.

Man, I'm sorry, but reading all these AI generated essays from students, it just sucks all the joy out of everything. It's exhausting, makes you into a weird paranoid cop, grinds you down, wastes your time, makes you feel like shit about everything. Fuck this shit technology and all its enablers.

Aug 27 in University District History: Strangest Fair lineup EVER. Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Theolonius Monk--the elite of American contemporary jazz--perform amid the hog judging, horse races, and 4-H kids from Darke County at 112th Ohio State Fair. In 1965.

Agree with #1 as well but, as with everything the Ringer publishes, if you’re only going to include 9 performances from non-English language films, why not just say you’re only considering English-language films? Also, it’s gotta have Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky!

Age verification? I played Ladder on my parents’ Kaypro computer.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

Columbus folks: my wife and I have gotten three calls over the past month purportedly from the Franklin County Sheriff Department trying to scam us. Wife called the actual sheriff department today to report this and they were like “oh yeah that’s happening constantly. Nothing we can do!” Cops, man.

I remember, pre-Colbert Report, seeing Stephen Colbert recite a long section of Ulysses at a Bloomsday event. He was great! And apparently he’s a longtime fan of the novel.

The full article is even worse; I can’t believe Rolling Stone is just reinventing the section asshole. Guarantee that this guy has read one (1) book, and it’s On the Road. Also probably read the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest and then gave up.

My last one I've already post a few months back about, but holy shit is Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World great. Hilarious, soul-crushing, formally experimental in multiple ways--no film has better captured the hellscape of late capitalism.

I couldn't get in to Apichatpong Weerasethakul films until I saw Memoria. His most accessible film--not saying much!--it keeps eluding one's comprehension, changing and transforming itself until an astonishing climax. Shoutout to his brilliant Syndromes and a Century too!

So absolutely grounded and convincing in its naturalism that it almost becomes symbolic, Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu involves a medical attendant taking a dying man from hospital to overcrowded hospital. An astonishing performance by Luminița Gheorghiu, in 2 of the films in my top 20!

Concealing an astounding amount of ethical and formal complexity beneath its simple surface, Jafar Panahi's No Bears is an absolute miracle. Its meta layers--a filmmaker who is and is not Panahi making another film--only add to its intellectual and emotional power. Funny, heartbreaking, furious.

Jose Luis Guerin’s In the City of Sylvia. Inspired very loosely by Vertigo, this is a gorgeous, almost dialogue-free celebration and critique of the aesthetic and erotic pleasures of looking, one that subtly links its present narrative to a long tradition of Western art, from Petrarch to Manet.

Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light: an essay film about Chile’s Atacama Desert, threads interviews with astronomers, anthropologists, and mothers of the disappeared into an intellectually demanding and emotionally overwhelming meditation on trauma and memory. Everyone should watch this.

Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. It’s bleak, sure, but not punishing. A timely portrait of the grim power of authoritarian charisma, this is a gorgeous, transfixing vision of cosmic and human disorder. So many images that will always stay with me.

In a just world, Donald Trump would be basically Curtis Sliwa: a vaguely nefarious but mostly ridiculous figure who people outside of New York City are only dimly aware of.

Maybe we need to start a "Jews who trust Zohran Mamdani over your lying asses" group I mean I know there's a Jews for Zohran group but I feel like the name of my group has some extra mmmphh to it

but what do you really think brad lander hellgatenyc.com/brad-lander-...

Lucretia Martel’s Zama. A colonialist is posted to a provincial Argentinian backwater and tries to figure a way out. He waits, and waits, and waits, to surreal and hilarious effect. And then all hell breaks loose. An indictment of colonialism, patriarchy, and more. Martel’s masterpiece.

My most obscure choice—Jacques Rivette’s late masterpiece The Story of Marie and Julien. A quasi-ghost story, this is weird and uncanny as only Rivette can do, always veering in unexpected directions. And yet by the end it’s profoundly moving. An underseen—and hard to find—classic.

Another Haneke: Code Unknown. Again, uses a genre—the “everything is connected” film—to critique its own values. But this is not the miserabilist slog I expected, but a brilliant vision of contemporary urban life, with even the most disturbing scene I’ve ever seen becoming a moment of solidarity.

Another shocking omission: Michael Haneke’s Caché. Both a nerve-jangling thriller and a critique of the ideologies of the genre, it finds a perfect narrative structure to indict both personal and national repression and denial of moral responsibility about the treatment of Algerian immigrants.

Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar finds inventive and transfixing ways to communicate visually and sonically the trauma, grief, and dissociation of the main character after her boyfriend’s suicide. An overwhelming experience, and a big influence on Aftersun, which did make the list.

Every Abbas Kiarostami film is masterpiece. But The Wind Will Carry Us is maybe my favorite. Deceptively simple on the surface—a Tehran journalist waits for a rural old woman to die while he struggles to get a cell phone signal—it becomes a funny and moving vision of time, death, and community.

The most shocking omission—#8 on the Sight and Sound greatest film list—is Claire Denis’s Beau Travail—a masterful adaptation of Billy Budd, an astonishing fusion of dance and music, a brilliant meditation on homosociality and colonialism. And the greatest final scene in film history.

Rather than stew about the rankings of the NY Times top 100 films of the century poll—the goal was to promote discussion of film, and it worked!—I’m just going to post appreciations of the 14 films in my top 20 that didn’t make the list at all.

"GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE"