2025 Movie Round-Up!!

Hello beloveds,

I have yet again commenced writing this round-up post on the last day of the month at a relatively late hour--but at least two months ahead of last year and WELL ahead of the previous year's multi-part round-up--so I will dispense with a lengthy preamble. It's time for the:

The PsychoCinematic Year in Movies
2025 Edition

1. Nosferatu (5)

2. The Last Showgirl (2)* & ****

3. Days of Heaven (4)

4. Lego Movie: The Second Part (4)***

5. The Sting (4)

6. One of Them Days (4)

7. Challengers (3)

8. Frozen (1)

9. Moana (5)***

10. Moana 2 (4)

11. Frozen 2 (2)

12. Tangled (3.5)***

13. Lily Topples the World (3)

14. Sinners (4)

15. A Nice Indian Boy (2)

16. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (5)

17. One of Them Days (4)***

18. 28 Years Later (5)

19. Jurassic World Rebirth (3.5)

20. Small Things Like These (5)

21. One Battle After Another (3)

22. Presence (4.5)

23. Weapons (5)

24. KPop Demon Hunters (5)

25. The Outrun (3)

26. 8-Bit Christmas (1)

27. The Spirit of Christmas (2)

28. Falling for Christmas (1)

29. The Night Before (3.5)***

30. Single All the Way (4)

31. A Christmas Prince (2.5)

32. Our Little Secret (2)

33. Argylle (3.5)

As a reminder, the extra notations mean the following:

* = got nauseated

** = fell asleep

*** = rewatch

**** = didn't finish

In reviewing last year's list of films after the second year in a row of a reduced movie-watching goal, I'm starting to feel the consequences of having less time, and even more so less emotional energy, for movies.  While I definitely saw a range of movies in 2025, including some that were really excellent, I would estimate a good third of the movies I watched last year were kind of filler-y.  It's hard feeling somewhat underwhelmed by movies, especially knowing my capacity to be deeply entranced and moved by them.

That said, my reduced movies resolution certainly has a few silver linings, not the least of which is that it is accomplishable.  Another is that I only watched three movies I utterly hated.  That ignominious trio is:

For attempting to indoctrinate vulnerable children with horrific ideology about toxic family relationships 

shrouded in the extremely belated virtue of not centering romantic love in a kids' movie for once:

Frozen (2013)

For attempting to update "A Christmas Story" (1983), a movie I don't have any particular affection for anyway, and doing a very bad job:
8-Bit Christmas (2021)

For being a terrible movie, but is it really fair to judge it for being a terrible movie when clearly its whole raison d'être is being a terrible movie?:
Falling for Christmas (2022)

I genuinely don't think it's fair to choose this particular abysmal Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie (because apparently that's a mini subgenre now??) as the worst movie of the year because it's clearly just trying to feed the apparently insatiable public appetite for embarrassingly bad Christmas movies, so "Falling for Christmas" is off the hook.  

Between our remaining two offenders, I have to go with the movie I've now watched dozens of times against my will because Disney has managed, despite my best intentions, to get its hooks into the brain of one of my precious babies who only recently has been liberated from his OBSESSION with this movie.  The only benefit of my forced multiple re-watchings of this movie is that it has prepared me to write an epic and fine-tooth-comb-level take down of this movie which I am dying to write if I ever get the time.

All that said, the worst movie of 2025 is:

And now, let's talk about the best movies of last year.  They were:

Nosferatu (2024)
Moana (2016)
Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street (2021)
28 Years Later (2025)
Small Things Like These (2024)
Weapons (2025)
KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

As usual, my highest-rated movies cover a lot of ground.  There's the moody, faithful yet enriched horror remake "Nosferatu" and the more novel yet still spooky and extremely well-executed "Weapons".  There are the classic and new kids' movies, "Moana" and "KPop Demon Hunters", both of which feature excellent music and beautiful animation, as well as the inspiring kids' media-related documentary "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street".  "Small Things Like These" may be the most emotionally difficult movie I watched last year, but we all know I love Cillian Murphy and the film is a grippingly told story of a chapter in Irish history that demands to be known.

All that said, as I choose my favorite movie of 2025, I've got to go with the movie that skillfully continued the legacy of the film that inspired my love of horror as a genre that, at its best, examines humanity at its ugliest and darkest and sometimes still manages to give us hope.  This movie reminded me, powerfully and humblingly, how much movies have the capacity to drop me into another life, into an emotional world I don't usually dwell in--in this case, their capacity to utterly scare the living crap out of me.  My favorite movie of 2025 was:

Thank you so much for being here, friends.  I'm looking forward to more movies in this new year, and to sharing them with you.

{Heart}

Closing 2025: Resolutions Edition

Hi darlings,

Welcome to 2026!

It's time to continue reflecting on the past year to set some intentions for the next.  First, let's recap the goals I set for 2025 and assess my success in accomplishing them:

1. Do sustainable, consistent, values-congruent things with my free time.

I think I did a pretty good job of accomplishing this goal, although that required making some adjustments and compromises I'm still having feelings about.  I continued to build local community, read (including one of the most gorgeous books I've read in a while), write, take photos and (FINALLY) print books of my photos, bake and cook, and care for plants and animals (inside and outside my home), each of which have brought me a lot of joy and satisfaction.  I would really like to get back into a routine of taking walks in my beautiful neighborhood, which would necessitate using the occasional free mornings I have for that purpose.  I also *still* miss my sweet little VR minigolf game and have not figured out how to fit that back into my life.

I got more involved with an additional recovery program and joined a small working group within that program, and I started a group chat for parents of young children who are in my original program.  I've kept doing readings, listening to recovery-focused podcasts, and going to meetings.  I also completed a healing-focused somatic and breathwork seminar that was really intense and helpful.  I'm still tentative about building more 1-on-1 relationships within those programs, but I'm also trying to respect my own process and not rush myself.

I participated in activism and mutual aid-related work throughout most of 2025, but by the last few months of the year I found that activism specifically was simply not compatible with the realities of my life as a parent with young children.  It became more and more impossible to attend regular meetings, even by Zoom, as they perfectly overlap with bedtime for my kids--a transition that is very much all-hands-on-deck and can't sustainably be done without both parents.  It's frustrating and demoralizing finding yet another aspect of life in America in which there is fundamentally not space made for parents.  It is especially anxiety-inducing that this is yet another place where it feels like I have no choice but to sit on the sidelines and hope that there's still work I can contribute in a few years when parenting isn't so full on.  

I feel extremely conflicted about my decision to scale back my participation in activist work, while also acknowledging that even characterizing it as a decision isn't totally accurate or fair to me.  Ideally these spaces would be accessible for everyone who wants to contribute, and they simply aren't for parents.  I'm hoping there are still ways for me to keep my hand in the game, so to speak, and it does look like that's possible if I can accept taking a much smaller role than I want to.  I'm hoping I can come to some degree of peace with that and also not have to totally forfeit this facet of myself for now.

2. Watch at least 30 movies, and write at least 15 posts.

I succeeded, just barely, in exceeding my 2025 movie-watching goal before the end of the year, thanks in no small part to some delightfully terrible Christmas movies I squeezed in as I was packing for my family for the holidays.  As you can see, I fell quite short of my writing goal, going so far as to skip writing in September entirely.  While I'm frustrated about that, the reality of my struggle to meet even these scaled-down goals has also helped soften my perfectionism about writing and accept that, while the totality of my life is really demanding right now, I'm doing the best I can.

Now, to propose goals for this year.  

Minor note: I don't mean to over-utilize the word "consistently" in the following resolutions, but it's important to me to prioritize endeavors I can pursue in a sustainable way rather than goals that have a specific accomplishment or outcome at the end.

1. Consistently engage in creativity.

I'm going to define "creativity" broadly while also using this resolution to hone in on some of the most rewarding leisure time I've had in the past year.  For the purposes of this resolution, creativity can mean things like writing, working on photography, decorating or redesigning a space, and coming up with fun activities to do with my family, but it can also mean the more generative aspect of creativity that is manifested in things like baking and caring for plants and animals.

2. Consistently care for myself physically and emotionally.

I'm proud of my continued engagement in a variety of emotional healing and recovery processes, and I see the cumulative benefit of those commitments year after year.  I'm also proud of breaking through whatever barrier(s) inhibited my ability to more actively care for myself physically, and that as a result I've been taking more personal responsibility not just for scheduling and transporting myself to medical, dental, and massage appointments, but also to doing physical therapy and exercising in my own time.  In 2026, I want to continue caring for myself in this holistic manner.

3. Consistently participate in anti-hunger and community-focused work and activism.

Of all of the horrific political incidents in the past year, one that was so repugnant that I struggle to comprehensively articulate how disturbed, upset, disgusted, and enraged I was as a result was the government's cutting of funding for SNAP benefits.  I want to consistently work to ensure people in my community aren't hungry.  Thankfully, I've found that there are several avenues for engaging in this kind of work that are more feasible for the stage of life I'm in.

4. Watch at least 30 movies and write at least one post per month.

I'm happy to say that I've already watched 9 movies this year, which under other circumstances might lead me to consider increasing this year's movie-watching goal.  But recent years have made it very clear that the mental, emotional, and practical space I have to watch movies tends to fluctuate a LOT over the course of the year, and I'd much rather keep my expectations of myself on this front gentle, realistic, and reasonable than set a goal I may not meet because I briefly felt cocky and overly ambitious.

All that aside, I'm excited for the movies of the future year, and I'm also excited for the time I'll spend writing about them.

I hope this new year is beautiful and so much better than any of us might be expecting.  Whatever happens, thankfully we're walking through it together.

{Heart}

Closing 2025: Accomplishment Cake Edition

Hey team,

In the interest of slipping one more post into this year, I'm going to hop on the cute little Accomplishment Cake thing I've seen here and there on the internet.  In what has otherwise been a pretty bleak and difficult year for the world and as a person living in it, it seems like a nice idea to share the things I'm proud of as a way to reflect on and recontextualize 2025.  Instead of skewering a real cake, I'll just list some highlights:

• I went on an amazing international trip with my best friend to mutually celebrate our milestone birthdays.  I also later made her a personalized birthday gift that I'm really proud of.
• I joined a new recovery program and it has already been hugely instrumental in furthering my healing and growth as a person.
• I started physical therapy for some old injuries and started regularly using our pandemic purchase elliptical.  Massages are still a critical part of my physical self-care, but I wanted to take more direct responsibility for how my body feels today and also for how it will fare well into the future.
• We survived a car accident in which we were badly rear-ended while Husband, our kids, and I were in the car.  I'm so proud of how we handled that moment and the fallout, and I'm so grateful that everyone was physically okay and our car kept us safe.
• Husband and I transitioned our oldest child into Kindergarten, and the experience has been so positive.  I'm so proud of everything our child has already accomplished and the dramatic, beautiful ways in which they've grown.
• I expanded my practice, including majorly revamping our practice's website myself and hiring a postdoctoral fellow.  It's great to be back in a supervisory and teaching professional role and to imagine what else my practice partner and I can take on together.
• After 7 years, I left my part-time hospital job to focus on my own practice.  There were a lot of great things about working there, but especially given the changes in my private practice, it was the right thing for my professional growth and I'm really glad I did it.
• For the first time, I took both of my kids on a trip to see my family while solo parenting.  It was A LOT, but it was such a good experience and I'm so grateful for the cousin time my kids got and the time with my family.

I'm so grateful to have happy things to remember from this past year, and I'm hopeful there will be more in the next.  I hope you all enjoy this New Year's Eve and that 2026 is a beautiful, healthy, happy year for you, friends.

{Heart}

A (Belated) Halloween Sampler for All Souls: 2025 Edition!

Happy almost Thanksgiving, dear friends!

Consistent with our overall energy this year, I didn't get around to writing this year's Halloween Sampler in October.  But honestly? It's fine.  Fall is an overall spooky season even after Halloween, and it's still a fun exercise to catalogue the scary movies I've seen each year.

As a reminder, each of the movies below will be rated with the usual overall 1 - 5 rating scale, as well as a scary/intense rating of 1 - 5 exclamation points, to be interpreted as follows:

! = not at all scary

!!!!! = so scary!

Let's goooooooooooo!

"Nosferatu" (2024)

Rating: 5 Scary Rating: !!!

Robert Eggers' remake of the 1922 classic is extraordinarily well-executed.  It is at once an almost shot-for-shot, extremely faithful version of the original, while also enhancing the story through selective additions and embellishments, as well as Eggers' deft auteurial touches.  As a psychologist, I am genuinely curious what happened to this man to make him so preoccupied with dark, brooding, and disturbing period piece horror, but as a viewer I genuinely appreciate his particular, transporting, immersive aesthetic.

While overall this is an excellent movie, hugely benefitted by Lily-Rose Depp's deep, visceral commitment to her role as Ellen, I found the stylistic decisions made for Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok, including his prosthetics and growling, heavily accented voice, to be heavy-handed and distracting.  I get that the iconic shot of the shadow of Orlok's unnaturally long, pointy-nailed hands reaching out over a sleepy German town essentially demand prosthetic fingers for the part, but they seemed clunky and these choices therefore bumped me out of the otherwise thoroughly engrossing movie.

"Sinners" (2025)

Rating: 4 Scary Rating: !!!!

For our second period vampire movie of the year, I made the probably insensitive decision to see "Sinners" on Easter morning, from the third row of an incongruously packed theater.  And it was so much fun!  The slow build of the plot, ensemble cast, powerful music, and culmination of the tension in a vampire-y recap of "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) all successfully breathe new life into the vampire drama, not to mention the film's use of this motif to examine the legacy of racism in the deep south.  There are fewer moments more chilling than the all-white band of vampires trying to seduce its way into the Black-owned new jazz joint by singing the too-perfect and too-cutesy "Pick Poor Robin Clean" to Hailee Steinfeld's Mary.  We also know I'm a sucker for the gimmick of having the same actor play twins, and Michael B. Jordan does not disappoint.

"28 Years Later" (2025)

Rating: 5 Scary Rating: !!!!!

I still feel the residual stress from watching this movie all these months later, and I'm still glad for it.  I am already bracing myself for the next installment in 2026.  For anyone fond of zombie movies or the original "28 Days Later" (2002), this is such an excellent next chapter, true to the gritty realism and heart-pounding, animal terror of its predecessor.

"Presence" (2024)

Rating: 4.5 Scary Rating: !!!

"Presence" is not a perfect movie in its execution, but its conceit is fascinating enough to overcome its shortcomings.  The movie tells a ghost story exclusively from the ghost's point of view within the house in which it's trapped.  We are thereby introduced to the Payne family through vignettes from the moment they first tour the home to subsequent both pivotal and seemingly benign moments after they move in.  While the acting is a bit stiff and stagey at times, Callina Liang as the traumatized and withdrawn daughter Chloe and Chris Sullivan as the protective yet at-wits'-end father Chris nevertheless deliver convincing and compelling performances.  This film is perfect for anyone wanting a perfectly spooky/haunting, not an outright terrifying, watch.

"Weapons" (2025)

Rating: 5 Scary Rating: !!!!

I wanted to see "Weapons" from the first time I saw that trailer.  The premise--that all but one child from one elementary classroom disappear overnight--immediately grabbed me.  That said, I also so anticipated that this movie could ruin my day by being too graphic, too scary, or both, that this is one of those times I performed a thorough Does the Dog Die? review ahead of time and watched it midday on my laptop as mitigation procedures.  (Please note that these measures may have artificially decreased the Scary Rating or this movie.)  And I'm so glad I did, because this is a great movie!  Despite my research, I managed to avoid any true plot spoilers, and that was very much to my benefit.  This is a really interesting, cool, novel kind of horror movie, and I loved it.

"KPop Demon Hunters" (2025)

Rating: 5 Scary Rating: !!

This year's kid-friendly entry!  I literally just finished watching this movie, somewhat belatedly after all of the buzz around it upon its release in June, and I loved it so much!  The animation style is super engaging, the characters are so appealing, the music is excellent, and the story is interesting and compelling. I'm a bit sad that the violence and portrayal of the titular demons might be a bit too scary for my oldest child to see this movie just yet, especially since they're already familiar and enamored with some of the music.  But I'm confident we'll watch it in a year or two, and I'll be glad for the chance to rewatch this amazing gem of a film.

And with that, I hope you had a wonderful Halloween, that you will have a wonderful Thanksgiving free of any familial nonsense, and that you'll enjoy some spooky movies if you wish!

{Heart}

Back in the Saddle

Hi friends,

I took an unintentional hiatus from writing last month, along with a longer unintentional hiatus from movie-watching.  I'm not happy about this slow-down and of course the perfectionist still lurking within me is very annoyed about breaking my post-per-month writing streak, especially relatively late in the year.  

As always, there are multiple contributing factors.  The first and most obvious is that the weekend coverage I've become so reliant on for quality solo time became less consistent, with our first beloved babysitter graduating from grad school and our second successfully landing a full-time job sooner than expected, followed by a few possibilities for coverage that fell through.  

Another is that my oldest child also started Kindergarten this year, which has been a huge and thankfully very positive transition, yet still huge.  

Then, on the first day I finally regained weekend coverage, it had been long enough since I had time to myself that it took me a little bit to mentally reorganize around how I'd like to use that time then commit to what to do with it.  I considered writing, but didn't have much to say given the unintentional movie break. Ultimately I settled into a really pleasant low-effort creative activity instead.

But today, I'm taking the bull squarely by the horns.  I will shortly disembark to watch:

It's almost three hours long.  It has some not-my-favorite and outright problematic men in it.  I am therefore somewhat ambivalent about this choice, and I recognize I may deeply regret this decision.  But here we go.

Wish me luck, I guess?

{Heart}