As long term readers well know, I like to do a few different wrap up posts at the end of each year. As long term readers would additionally know, I’ve been less than consistent in my posting over the last year especially. Which is a good part of why this second post unpacking my 2025 in terms of cinema and life is coming out nearly halfway through 2026. Many apologies. Life is tricky and I’m bad at scheduling.

The Ten Most Memorable Movies I Watched In 2025

10. Megadoc
You may remember that in 2024 I was overwhelmed by Megalopolis, indisputably one of the worst films ever made. So why am I talking about a documentary about said film? Well, because I’m fascinated by the film. It’s an absolute mess made by a man who’d never made anything at that scale before and had no idea how to do this and it all fell apart spectacularly. Not to mention he was working with some of the weirdest personalities you could get together in one film. I would encourage everybody to watch Megadoc, especially if you’ve seen Megalopolis. Even if it’s not called “Megadocolis” for some dumb reason, it’s still worth it. I wrote a pretty comprehensive review on my Letterboxd account.
Megadoc, A Great Movie About A Terrible Movie

9. Hamnet
I’m cheating with this one because quite honestly this movie was not memorable and while I don’t think it was bad, I don’t think it was very good. It had little to no impact on me. Well, that’s not true. The performance of Hamnet himself and how Jessie Buckley handles his passing was obviously heartbreaking. I did not care for the ending where they’re watching the play and Chloé Zhao slammed my head against the wall repeatedly and screamed “THIS IS THE THEME OF THE MOVIE! ART! PROVIDES!! CATHARSIS!!!” This was the movie of the year for me that everyone said “We love this, this is high art” and I saw it and said “This is bland and does not resonate with me at all”, which was my reaction to Anora the year before. The difference is that all the film people I follow on Letterboxd mostly bounced off this as well, whereas they all love Anora. I think Hamnet is mostly a good enough movie despite it not working for me. I despise Anora and actively hope that everyone realizes it’s messy and boring and will not endure as the poster boy for independent cinema everyone claims it is. Did I add this mostly to complain about a movie from 2024? That’s irrelevant.
Reviewing the Net of Ham

8. A Working Man
If you’ve read my 2024 post, you’ll know that last year I watched and hated the movie The Beekeeper, which is essentially the same movie as this but somehow much better. This movie is so boring and the pacing is so terrible and it’s a truly insulting cinematic experience. I wrote notes when I saw it, I remember there was a creepy Grandpa who threw a birthday party with a furry red hat on, for some messed up Alice In Wonderland themed party. This is a subplot in a movie about a bald British construction worker killing sex traffickers. It’s deeply strange. Here’s my Letterboxd review.
A Boring Man

7. Black Bag
I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard of this movie. You should go and watch it right now. It’s pretty great. This is a spy movie that largely eschews the louder tropes of most spy movies. It’s just a movie about people who suck using each other to do evil spy things. And it’s all very sexy and complicated but in a way that entirely plays off the oddball chemistry of the leads rather than trying to be sexy. I need to give it a rewatch because it basically came out five years ago. That’s what releasing a movie in February feels like. If you make a movie with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as your leads, you basically have a home run already. It’s the kind of quiet thriller that doesn’t get made anymore. You just need to watch it.
Steven Soderbergh’s Beautiful Black Bag

6. One Battle After Another
There’s not much to say about this that hasn’t been said. I just thought I’d acknowledge that I have seen and enjoyed the movie that won Best Picture. It’s not my favorite movie from last year, nor is it my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It is, I think, possibly my favorite Benicio Del Toro performance, maybe ever? I’m hot and cold on the guy. He was also in The Phoenician Scheme last year, which should have been a slam dunk for me considering it’s a Wes Anderson movie and Michael Cera is in it, but I still haven’t fallen in love with it. I would argue while Del Toro is good in Phoenician, he absolutely crushes it here. I don’t even care if it’s a meme at this point, the “Few small beers” scene is so incredibly charming and disarming. Sensei is just living in his own world. It’s great.
And yeah, of course Sean Penn was great in this, but he didn’t want award recognition, and I’m still kind of frustrated that he won over Stellan, who is so incredibly good in Sentimental Value, a movie I enjoy but don’t feel the need to talk about here. I think I speak for the majority of America that the lessons to be learned from this movie are: Go weird. You can make a triumphant box office and critical hit that also includes longtime SNL writer Jim Downey saying the phrase “semen demon”. Leo is now a fairly reliable elder statesman and he can keep killing it in movies but his real life persona is too odious to be applauded. And Chase Infiniti is the future of movies.
One Review After Another

5. Marty Supreme
It’s no longer cool to enjoy this movie considering the many controversies surrounding the filmmakers and the stars in it. Though I’d say Chalamet came out of it alright if the main thing people are upset at him for is dissing ballet. He’s not Kevin O’Leary. I still think this movie rules. It hit me like a ton of bricks when I first saw it. It’s an insane cinematic experience. That experience is diminished somewhat by rewatching it at home, it loses a bit of its shine. It’s still a good movie, just not one I’ll revisit a ton. I think it’s fairly undeniable that Best Actor went to the right person, but you can’t say that Chalamet doesn’t put everything he has into this performance.
It’ll be nice to see him win ten years from now for a much lesser performance in a weaker film. This is the way of things. Everyone’s always getting their due and it’s not often people are awarded properly at the proper time. This movie is a great entry in the canon of “Movies where pretty much everyone in them is a terrible person”. There’s maybe three people in this that don’t fully suck and even then they do something a little stupid or messed up. But this one has the distinction of being able to say that some of the horrible people are played by Penn Jillette or the guy from Shark Tank.
Review Supreme

4. The Naked Gun
Oh, man. What a movie. I may have said it already in this post, but I’ll say it again. I think 2024 was, on average, a pretty piss poor year for movies. A lot of that was due to the strike, so I’m not complaining, I’d prefer people get fair treatment. But that Oscar’s roster was pretty dire. I still think The Brutalist was my favorite movie in that whole lineup, and it’s a solid movie, but I don’t want to be the guy out there defending a nearly four hour long pretentious epic about an arrogant architect. I think it rules, but I’m probably never going to watch it again. What I’m trying to say is that 2025 soared where 2024 fell so miserably.
This roster of movies I’m talking about is full of the kinds of films that don’t get made anymore, and of them all, this is probably the most important. This movie is so fucking stupid. There’s an extended sequence in The Naked Gun (2025) in which Pamela Anderson does bad jazz scatting at a night club.
There’s another extended sequence involving the dropping of the New Years Balls. There’s two. Because of testicles. At one point in the climactic showdown between hero and villain, Liam Neeson leaves to go to the bathroom, and Dave Bautista just does the final monologue for him. It’s a stupid movie full of stupid jokes about stupid things. And it’s one of the best movies that came out last year, hands down.
This movie made me so happy. I have a Naked Gun poster in my room right now. There’s even a Clippy joke in this! Do you remember Clippy?! I cannot overemphasize how wonderful it is to see a willfully stupid comedy on the big screen again. Oh, and Liam Neeson was the only person who could fill Leslie Nielsen’s shoes. He filled them beautifully. That sounds like a dirty joke somehow. It’s not.
The Naked Gun Review: From The Files of Too Many Servings of John

3. Wake Up Dead Man
It will come to no surprise to absolutely anybody that I like this movie. It’s a sequel (Sort of) to two movies I love, of a genre I love, starring maybe my favorite actor currently working, (Sorry Paul) Mr. Daniel Craig. He was also incredible in Queer, another 2025 film. I rewatched this too much and I keep honing in on the flaws now, which I don’t love. I do think the ensemble cast is the least utilized of the three films. Cailee Spaeny has basically nothing to do here and I feel like Andrew Scott and Thomas Haden Church especially get short changed as well. That being said, it’s a great two-hander centered around Craig and O’Connor. Josh O’Connor maybe playing the best protagonist of a Benoit Blanc movie thus far? Even though Ana De Armas fucking killed it?? I don’t know. Oh, and Josh Brolin shines as a truly loathsome murder victim. Such a great performance. This really was the year of Brolin. Though in terms of this list, his shining moment is still to come. I just want Rian and Daniel to keep making these movies until the universe collapses. And, this is important, I need Daniel Craig to keep the long hair. It’s a very sexy look. This one is also especially visually striking in a way that can’t go unnoted. The film, I mean. And the Daniel Craig.
Wake Up Dead Man, A Movie That Rules

2. Sinners
This was not a movie I was particularly excited for. The premise, to me, felt trite. The trailers didn’t particularly do much for me. I sound like such an idiot, don’t I? I listened to a review after it came out from The Weekly Planet podcast, the greatest podcast of all time. They talked about a very specific scene where music overtakes a room, all eras of music coming together simultaneously. I was hearing all of a sudden that it was this incredible film everyone loved.
So my roommate and I went and saw it and it was awesome. There’s not much for me to say. It’s an undeniably great movie. The music is incredible, the performances rule. I love that the first half of the movie is just setup for the characters and the ideas at play. This is a movie in which Delroy Lindo just shows up and kicks ass from his very first scene. Which is not surprising if you’ve seen literally any movie with Delroy Lindo in it. It’s just a great movie. Not much else to say. This is the kind of movie all movies should be like.
SINNERS, IT RULES!

1. Weapons
I feel weird that my favorite movies of the last two years were insane messed-up horror movies. But I’m a weird dark guy. This is such a messed-up movie too, to an insane degree. Everyone in it is so good. This is the best Brolin performance of the year. They have very different energies, those performances. Originally before the strikes this was going to be Pedro Pascal instead of Brolin.
People fixate on different performances in this movie, like the Oscar winning Amy Madigan, which was clearly a deserved win. And Benedict Wong as school principal who loves eating hot dogs with his husband. But clearly the best performance in this movie comes from Brolin when he wakes up from a nightmare about his missing son and is freaked out and just screams “What the fuck?!” It’s one of the greatest things to ever happen in a horror movie.
There’s not much more to say. I love the character focus and how it’s all segmented and locked in like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And it’s super unnerving but not in a jump scare way, it builds tension and subverts it. And it has one of the greatest endings a movie could ever have. It’s set up perfectly and the payoff is beautiful. This is the best kind of movie.
Weapons!!!

TV I Enjoyed In 2025
I believe I talked about Severance already at the beginning of the year, and it feels like it came out forever ago. It was a great season. I’m interested to see how the next season goes because they’ve completely upended the status quo at this point. I have not watched The Pitt and I’m sure Noah Wyle’s a nice guy but it’s a fucking crime that Adam Scott lost the Emmy to a guy playing a Doctor. There’s an entire scene in the season two finale where Adam Scott has a conversation with himself, and there’s so much nuance in that insane performance, but you don’t think that’s award worthy?
It was also a nicely bookended year in terms of the great sci-fi Apple TV shows because Pluribus rules. If you don’t know the premise I won’t tell you but it’s such a weird show that delves deeper into the concept than I could have predicted. I’m being quite vague, I’ve realized, unintentionally. I don’t know. TV is good. I didn’t care for the final season of Stranger Things though, at all. Weak sauce.
Oh, right. Speaking of sauce, except this sauce is more confusing than anything else, Poker Face season two. Overall solid and still fun but if you want to hear something incredibly odd, look into their plans for season three. If I tried to explain it this post would become a long rant and I’ll talk about it another time.

Great Comics of 2025
Let’s see… I mean I love a good comic book obviously. Ultimate Spider-Man went… not downhill, but steadily plodded along and didn’t amount to anything. The Daredevil run by Saladin Ahmed and The Flash by Si Spurrier finally finished up and have now been replaced by what are so far, markedly more interesting comic books. Those comics depressed me so damn much. All respect to the writers, but… no. Yucky. Bad.
The big thing for me is I read the first volume of Beneath The Trees Where Nobody Sees, which is such a great concept executed pretty solidly. Basically it’s Dexter with cute anthropomorphic forest animals living in a small town. There’s a sociopathic serial killer bear named Samantha Strong. Volume two came out in 2025 and was, in my opinion, even better. Everyone should check it out. I’ve recommended it to my friends and gifted it to people.
Also it led to one of the funniest things in comic books that happened in comics last year. There was this big tournament based DC event comic called DC K.O. and they somehow arranged this one-off issue featuring a bunch of characters from other comic companies and universes. The issue itself is mostly a missed opportunity and not much happens, but it has one of my favorite things ever. I’ll post it below. It is Lex Luthor, one of the smartest and most evil men in all of comics, smugly winning his way through the tournament, and then just completely baffled by an anthropomorphic serial killer bear in a flannel and jeans. It’s fucking hilarious.

Life Stuff of 2025
So, some of this I’ve covered, and I’ll talk about some of it in a different post, but so much stuff has happened, which is a good part of why I’ve been off the grid blog-wise. Here’s a general list.

1. I went on a trip to Canada.
2. I graduated!
3. I moved back home.
4. I went on a trip to Philadelphia and Baltimore!
5. I struggled to be productive and get a good job for several months.
6. I got my driver’s license finally!
7. I languished a bit longer and didn’t do enough to get back on track.
8. I got a lease with my friend Katy and moved to Washington, DC where I’ve lived officially for three months now, I believe?

So now I’m just trying to get a permanent reliable job and write more and be productive and happy. I don’t succeed every day but I’m largely having a pretty good time. And it’s great to live with Katy again. Though I miss my family. So there’s ups and downs. But it’s a good time, for the most part. Longer posts incoming soon. This is one I needed to finally make.

Next time on Too Many Servings of John… Probably one of the last Flying Nun Recaps, we’re at the tail end of that. But I can hear a power ballad off in the distance… Power Ballad is the name of Paul Rudd’s next movie. It was a clever joke. Hahahahaha. Okay, bye!