Listed below are my top 100 first-time watches (films, TV, shorts, etc’) of the year. Items listed in green denote new releases.

100-51

100. Blinkity Blank (dir. Norman McLaren, 1940)
99. Local Legends (dir. Matt Farley, 2013)
98. Black Bag (dir. Steven Soderbergh, 2025)
97. Smorgasbord (or, Cracking Up) (dir. Jerry Lewis, 1983)
96. List (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
95. A Different Man (dir. Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
94. Afternoon (dir. Mike Leigh, 1982)
93. Diseased and Disorderly (dir. Andrew and Eden Kotting, 2021)
92. Kin-dza-dza! (dir. Georgiy Daneliya, 1986)
91. Yo! A Romantic Comedy (dir. Ryan Trecartin, 2002)
90. The Ethereal Melancholy of Seeing Horses in the Cold (dir. Scott Barley, 2012)
89. Eephus (dir. Carson Lund, 2024)
88. Smiley Face (dir. Gregg Araki, 2007)
87. Herzog Blaubarts Burg (dir. Michael Powell, 1963)
86. Blackmail (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1929)
85. Slums of Beverly Hills (dir. Tamara Jenkins, 1998)
84. The Blood of a Poet (dir. Jean Cocteau, 1932)
83. My Cousin Vinny (dir. Jonathan Lynn, 1992)
82. A Place in the Sun (dir. George Stevens, 1951)
81. Estate, a Reverie (dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2015)
80. Turksib: The Steel Road (dir. Viktor Alexandrovitsch Turin, 1929)
79. They Do Not Exist (dir. Mustafa Abu Ali, 1976)
78. Kitchen Girl (dir. Ryan Trecartin, 2001)
77. The Bedtime Stories series (dir. Harun Farocki, 1977)
76. Possum O’Possum (dir. Greg Killmaster, 1981)
75. The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (dir. William E. Jones, 1998)
74. REFORM! (dir. Jon Bois, 2024)
73. Blind (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1986)
72. Ashes (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)
71. Richard Jewell (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2019)
70. The Day He Arrives (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2011)
69. The Alphabet (dir. David Lynch, 1969)
68. The Crowd (dir. King Vidor, 1928)
67. Lost in the Mountains (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2009)
66. Hinterlands (dir. Scott Barley, 2016)
65. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2000)
64. The Color of Pomegranates (dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1969)
63. Louyre: This Our Still Life (dir. Andrew Kotting, 2011)
62. Blanket Statement #1: Home Is Where the Heart Is (dir. Jodie Mack, 2012)
61. The Underground Railroad (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2021)
60. One False Move (dir. Carl Franklin, 1992)
59. Boarding Gate (dir. Olivier Assayas, 2007)
58. What Happened Was… (dir. Tom Noonan, 1994)
57. A Traveler’s Needs (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
56. (Tommy-Chat Just Emailed Me.) (dir. Ryan Trecartin, 2006)
55. Green Snake (dir. Tsui Hark, 1993)
54. Utah Sequences (dir. Nancy Holt, 1970)
53. The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2025)
52. Dots (dir. Norman McLaren, 1940)
51. Whistle and I’ll Come To You (dir. Jonathan Miller, 1968)

50-26

50. We Were Hardly More Than Children (dir. Cecelia Condit, 2019)
49. Pirated! (dir; Nguyen Tan Hoang, 2000)
48. Hapax Legomena III: Critical Mass (dir. Hollis Frampton, 1971)
47. Belfast, Maine (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1999)
46. The Arrival (dir. Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
45. Unknown Pleasures (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2002)
44. Taskafa, Stories of the Street (dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2013)
43. Right Now, Wrong Then (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2015)
42. Linda Linda Linda (dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)
41. Sleepwalk (dir. Sara Driver, 1986)
40. Nickel Boys (dir. RaMell Ross, 2024)
39. Targets (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)
38. Diane (dir. Alan Clarke, 1975)
37. Night Mail (dir. Harry Watt and Basil Wright, 1936)
36. Prison Images (dir. Harun Farocki, 2000)
35. Abigail’s Party (dir. Mike Leigh, 1977)
34. Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2024)
33. The Hired Hand (dir. Peter Fonda, 1971)
32. Hotel by the River (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2018)
31. Hard Truths (dir. Mike Leigh, 2024)
30. Original Cast Album: Company (dir. D. A. Pennebaker, 1970)
29. Ash is Purest White (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2018)
28. Dog Star Man (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1965)
27. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
26. Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop, 2024)

25-1

25. Equinox Flower (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1958)
24. Monrovia, Indiana (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2018)
23. Journey to Italy (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
22. A Family Finds Entertainment (dir. Ryan Trecartin, 2005)
21. Cloud (dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2024)
20. Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1986)
19. Penda’s Fen (dir. Alan Clarke, 1974)
18. The Shrouds (dir. David Cronenberg, 2024)
17. I, an Actress (dir. George Kuchar, 1977)
16. Caught by the Tides (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2024)
15. Meet Me in St. Louis (dir. Vinente Minnelli, 1944)
14. Gallivant (dir. Andrew Kotting, 1996)
13. Suburbs of Eden (dir. Cecelia Condit, 1992)
12. The Doom Generation (dir. Gregg Araki, 1995)
11. Lancelot of the Lake (dir. Robert Bresson, 1974)
10. No Name on the Bullet (dir. Jack Arnold, 1974)
9. The Ascent (dir. Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
8. 964 Pinocchio (dir. Shozin Fukui, 1991)
7. The United States of America (dir. Bette Gordon and James Benning, 1975)
6. By the Stream (dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2024)
5. I-Be Area (dir. Ryan Trecartin, 2007)
4. Glistening Thrills (dir. Jodie Mack, 2013)
3. Night and Fog (dir. Alain Resnais, 1956)
2. News from Home (dir. Chantal Akerman, 1976)
1. At Sea (dir. Peter Hutton, 2007)

Top New Releases:

1. By the Stream
2. Caught by the Tides
3. The Shrouds
4. Cloud
5. Dahomey
6. One Battle After Another
7. Hard Truths
8. Juror #2
9. Nickel Boys
10. The Mastermind
11. A Traveler’s Needs
12. REFORM!
13. Eephus
14. A Different Man
15. Black Bag

Least Favourite First-time Watches (i.n.p.o.):

• The Last Bus (dir. Gillies MacKinnon, 2021)
• We Live In Time (dir. John Crowley, 2024)
• Save Ralph (dir. Spencer Susser, 2021)
• Fisherman’s Friends (dir. Chris Foggin, 2019)
• Escape from the 21st Century (dir. Li Yang, 2024)
• Table 19 (dir. Jeffrey Blitz, 2017)
• It’s a Boy Girl Thing (dir. Nick Hurran, 2006)
• Oh. What. Fun. (dir. Michael Showalter, 2025)
• Love the Coopers (dir. Jessie Nelson, 2015)
• Taken (dir. Pierre Morel, 2008)

When an evil goes unrecognised, it leaves a miasma. Everything the nameless evil touches suddenly feels worse. Paranoia is a byproduct that is unwanted and isolating, and yet entirely justified. Contradictions multiply when the contradiction itself is never solved, such is the nature of the unsolved dialectic. Many surfaces in Sara Driver’s Sleepwalk lead one to believe that an Oriental curse is this evil; that Nicole (played by Suzanne Fletcher) has awoken a force in need of soothing by translating an ancient Chinese manuscript stolen by two mysterious gentlemen. By its conclusion however, no curse has been solved. It transports her through the floors she never visited on her work elevator, and violently awakens the technology in her workplace, but its presence is never confirmed and its fate is left uncertain. Nicole’s future – with her son, her roomate, her work – is unknown.

For those looking for conventional satisfactions, there are none to be found. By the end, we know more about the folks whose lives are intertwined in this curse than the curse itself; left to permeate their realities, if indeed it ever existed at all. A critical reading offers one interpretation: that this curse is merely an Orientalist scapegoat for the sly manoeuvrings of capital in an increasingly post-socialist world. Haywiring electronics may perhaps be coincidental, but their associations with the technologies of labour – in the space of metropolitan labour practice, a small New York City copyshop – foreground a negative energy that has begun to effect Nicole’s sense of personhood. The elevator opening at random floors to reveal new worlds unknown to her, including the base of the two men who gave her the manuscript to begin with, alienate but do not harm. Each floor thus reveals something outside of Nicole’s routine. Nicole’s son Jimmy (a young Chinese-American boy) and her roomate Isabelle (an illegal European immigrant) are never the scapegoated target of her ire. Indeed, they are the worst victims of this curse; as Jimmy is unintentionally kidnapped, and Isabelle’s hair begins to fall out.

Whilst I don’t disagree that this reading remains part of Sleepwalk‘s ideological core, its aesthetic distancing is its core message. Its deliberate play with convention – not along lines of symbolic pastiche but via its technical principles, or even the material implications of pastiche – is not as nihilistic as New York’s No Wave is often viewed as being. That its aesthetic register is so stark, ironic, and patient – yet emotion-, image-, and actor-forward – implies that its concern is with the aesthetic/affective politics of the neoliberal moment. Driver’s New York is like that of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, but haunted; soaked in irony-with-sincerity. This choice not only renders Orientalism gauche and contrived in this universe, but fundamentally unsatisfying as a principle. One needs to delve deeper, but the language for it is missing. In this sense, Sleepwalk is typically No Wave: confrontational in its own distance, whilst developing its own aesthetic via the discordance between capital’s symbolic and material reality. I am surprised then that it remains so underappreciated in the canon of No Wave cinema. Especially so given Sara Driver’s respect in the NYC indie film circuit, early performances from the likes of Tony Todd and Steve Buscemi that seem primed for rep house cratedigging, and the prominence of its cinematographer Jim Jarmusch. Maybe it came too late, just as its practitioners and aesthetics dissipated and postmodernity began to militantly incorporate any and all aesthetics into itself. Maybe it’s not late enough.

Spoilers for One Battle After Another ahead.

At the beginning of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson flirts with a defeatism, seemingly rationalised via biology: the inability to escape the sexual drives which transcend all ideology. Amidst the militantly organised liberation of a migrant detention centre by rebel outfit The French 75, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor) confronts head of the detention operation Colonel Steven Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn). Polar opposites in the heat of battle, there is still an undeniable force between them: Lockjaw’s feverish sexual obsession with her, and Perfidia’s own desire to control him through this obsession – one which she enjoys, but can casually play off given the circumstances. This play of sexual power presents an initial dilemma – what does the right hold that the left doesn’t, and vice versa? What is to be made of the radical if the conservative is so alluring? Are we thus faced with, to quote Jacques Derrida, a vis a vis? Is there a compromise?

The rest of the film, however, is not content with this. Indeed, their “union” reflects the core ideological conflict that underpins the film – that is to say, we live in the aftermath of the vis a vis. This is a fake co-existence that presents itself as truth and freedom, but has only violently exacerbated the forces of the right; stagnating the present in a turmoil where the libidinal frustrations of then not only resonate now, but have become far cruder; far more unsatisfied; restless; esoteric; fascistic. Our mistake is in thinking that the libido instils a necessary compromise. Instead, the libido insists that there is a field that the left – the ‘radical’, the ‘revolutionary’ – has yet to fully appreciate or understand. Perfidia was a rat, and the vibrancy of her rhetoric conflicted with an incomplete (albeit determined) desire for radical action, but she was not wrong to lust. Libido is not a trap which will always halt radical action. It is, however, rooted in the anxieties and dissonances which inform our spirits. Her charged intimacies with Lockjaw merely manifest her own structural desires; which transcend ideology in so far as she wishes to be rid of the ideological fight – for herself, more than for her friends and family. This is why she flees the home that Lockjaw helped her secure in witness protection, as the reality of her libidinal limits have become all too apparent. She must run, for staying will never grant her rest. This is decidedly not Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland; where the flaccid utopianism of 60s hippiedom has been replaced by the CIA philosopher-kings of Brock Vond. In Anderson’s world, the cultural rot has already set in. Everything is the same as it was 16 years before, only with different shades and patinas. Its racisms are grizzled but with a post-familial legacy far beyond that of its radical counterpart (a brilliant cameo from veteran Kevin Tighe epitomises this). There is nothing of Mark Fisher’s acid communism, only an unsolved libidinal maze.

In this vein, though the central narrative is between Bob Ferguson (aka – Rocketman, or ‘Ghetto’ Pat Colhoun) and his daughter Willa (aka – Charlene Calhoun), it is Steven Lockjaw who becomes the de facto main character. Lockjaw is a man whose military life has long been the manifestation of a repressed libido, unable to come to terms with who he is as a white heterosexual man in a world that despite his best efforts is always moving beyond him. He must find security in the hegemony, so much so that he strives to join the Christmas Adventurers Club: an elite cult of white supremacists whose connections to the abstract avenues of capital – military, industrial, state, local, wherever and however – are what Lockjaw strives for. He wants to be like these guys. Gilleted and wanting for nothing, sleek in their WASP-ish charms, and unencumbered by fragilities. But Steven Lockjaw is a fragile man. His militant stride is both affected and naturalised. Whilst not short, he is shorter than the men around him, and thus attempts to command a mannekinesque authority. Anderson gets “on his level”, often shooting from low angles, but such pretences rarely grant him the authority he desires. He has a gnarled face, constant mouth ticks, overly-militant expressions, and uses spit as hair gel for an atrocious hairstyle that reads as a naive alt-right undercut. He reads as a man who has spent so many hours staring at his peculiarities in the mirror that he has forgotten about the very spirit which that vessel carries. His hatred for non-white folk has all to do with wanting more for himself; for securing a place that the military has been unable to entirely grant him. His attraction to Perfidia – a black woman whose relationship to her race is far more radical and open than Lockjaw’s own relationship to his whiteness – is a contradiction. Yet more significantly, this element of his attraction becomes violently intensified as he cannot view his own libido beyond the structures of race and capital that he has devoted himself to in the pursuit of a calmness to his restless inner spirit.

It is the strive for him to eliminate all traces of his association with the Other that thrusts the film forward, reigniting a momentary revolution for which he is the villain to overcome. Of course, destiny has another fate for him. The revolution never gets close to harming him really. Even when Bob has him in the sights of his sniper, he misses and Lockjaw keeps on walking as if nothing has happened. He gets close to death when, after finally kidnapping Willa and leaving her fate in the hands of a white supremacist sect of the military, a hitman hired by the Christmas Adventurers – after discovering his relationship to Perfidia and the existence of their child, Charlene/Willa – shotguns him in the face, causing him to career his car off the road. He somehow survives, striding back towards us with a face bloodied and mangled. After the dust has settled and his face has healed into a permanent scar, he returns to the Christmas Adventurers, ignorant of their initial plan. Thinking that he has finally made it into their echelons, he is guided to an office where he is locked in, quietly gassed to death, and then quickly cremated. A bigger and more efficient power works beyond him, despite his apparent control over military might and a state apparatus that is seemingly at his command and willing to divorce violent personal action from violent political action. To reference another DiCaprio film, he is this story’s Ernest Burkhart – a man too ignorant and blinded by desire to realise his role in the grander scheme of capitalist oppression but likewise a repugnant pawn who ends up a squirming figurehead of the libidinal hegemony. The title – One Battle After Another – thus rears its head again: there is always more work to be done.

Put simply, Lockjaw is a caricature of the fascist libido; or at least one strain of it. He is a caricature in this sense that in the will to conceive of sexual politics along such masculinist conservative lines – a casualised sadomasochism devoid of consent, mutuality, and tenderness – the contradictions bloom into the esoteric and the abstract; the frightening tentacular paradoxes which only grow stronger and more numerous the more you resist. When we speak of genres being bodily – to hint at Linda Williams’ seminal ‘Film Bodies’ – the narrative’s evolution into suspense action drama seem almost to be the translation of Lockjaw’s lack of fulfillment; pushed onto everyone around him and into cinematic spacetime. Bob and Willa Ferguson’s world ripples and clunks at Lockjaw’s repressions now that he has announced himself on the stage of the uber-fascists themselves, with no hope of turning back other than the death which ultimately befalls him. Perhaps this is why Paul Thomas Anderson sacrifices some of the stronger compositional tendencies of works like Inherent Vice or The Master. Instead, he opts for something closer to an affective continuity or montage: a stronger sense of images in flow and transition, as meaning arriving from something less causal and more spasmodic and tortured; desperate for a climax.

This is at least part of the reason why I’ve never been able to fully get on board with the Pyun re-evaluation hype. There is something singular about his work which portends a vulgar auteurist framing; especially films such as Nemesis and Radioactive Dreams which display a craftsmanship beyond the rote Cannon-isms that many of his other films exude. I am also willing to give him some credit for Captain America. It is by no means a masterpiece, but it has been so critically caught up in the self-serious and impotently-ironic pretences of contemporary Hollywood cinema – a la Russo brothers – that its actual ambitions are too easily dismissed. Yet the issue that blights Pyun’s films (Raven Hawk included) above all else – even beyond the financial periphery that is now canon to his biography – is this naive emblazoning of Hollywood’s ideological codes. Raven Hawk sees itself within the legacy of films like First Blood and Raw Deal – even its femmachismo sisters Aliens or Ballistic – and, I would argue, holds its own in many aspects. For instance, Pyun regular George Mooradian’s cinematography is far more compositionally-rigorous than a straight-to-TV production usually strives for; like it was content to play the long game of waiting for the days of 4:3 CRTs to be over. Yet in its desire to be both above and a part of Hollywood’s sexual ideologies, without due consideration as to how the two interact, we end up here: an ex(r)oticised hotchpotch.