2025
An End of Year Report
Movies
Life is fine as a standard sci-fi horror. I join the chorus of journalists who noted how derivative it is: mainly Alien, but also a little bit of The Thing and probably Event Horizon but I had stopped thinking after a point. A general audience might like the idea of a meat and potatoes genre movie, but I promise Life is predictable to its detriment. I got twenty minutes in and said to myself, I thought Kristen Stewart was in this? And I thought it was underwater? Maybe it starts off in space and then goes underwater. Then I realised I thought I had settled down to watch Underwater.
The Monkey was good fun. I did expect more from it, partly because of how much I enjoyed the director’s previous Longlegs but also because the trailer made it look anarchic. I’d have liked it to have been more bombastic and irreverent. Having said that, hats off to Oz Perkins. If it weren’t for a couple of needle-drops, the film would have been completely different to Longlegs. Its characters/plot/absurd deaths will make any horror fan giggle.
Bijou is a film I’ve wanted to watch ever since I heard Peter Strickland praise it. (I’m a huge Peter Strickland fan. I should probably write about him on here at some point.) From memory, he included it in his favourite film list for Sight and Sound in whichever year it was that Jeanne Dielman… was named the greatest movie of all time. Holly Rowley from Paraphysis Cinema (and SchizoEroticism) hooked me up with a copy and it’s glorious. Psychedelic gay porn reminiscent of Kenneth Anger from an era when calling porn art didn’t have to come with a thousand caveats and qualifiers.
Conclave was great! Ralph Fiennes is one of those actors I’d watch in anything (shout out to The White Crow and The Grand Budapest Hotel). Conclave reminded me of Foucault’s Pendulum, oddly enough. Umberto Eco banned his novels from being optioned because the adaptation of The Name of the Rose was so shit. When Kubrick died, Umberto found out the maestro wanted to adapt Foucault’s Pendulum but never asked because of the ban. A tragedy for cinema imo! This is to say Conclave might be the closest we get to a great adaptation of The Name of the Rose, at least in spirit. It even has a character named Aldo.
The biggest surprise this year was a film from last year: Heretic. I don’t know what I was expecting. It’s well directed and written and acted… I won’t say too much, it relies on an audience knowing as little as possible, but I loved how it feels like a chamber piece before contorting its set in unexpected ways. Up there with Barbarian as the very best in real estate horror. It gets creepy and tense but can change tone suddenly with a piece of music here, a switch of pace there. My one mild criticism might be that the American characters never ask Hugh Grant, a character with his British accent, So, what brought you to the US? My expectations were low and, if I’m being honest, I probably wouldn’t rewatch it for a long time because it’s so reliant on twists and turns. Still, recommended.
One Battle After Another was covered here. Film of the year? Probably among the best films of this decade.
I tried watching Strippers vs Werewolves (“with a special guest appearance by Martin Kemp”) on Amazon Prime, thinking I’d get points with the cinema crowd who watch trash and then talk about Marx. I got to 5 minutes and 17 seconds. How do you fuck up Strippers vs Werewolves? You introduce some dominant female leads, a werewolf runs in and then they shoot and trample on him. If any of you want to pay me, I will write a screenplay with strippers and werewolves and it will be the greatest movie of all time. To any of you who think, This sounds fun actually… Let’s watch it! Firstly, I promise the first 5 minutes and 17 seconds aren’t fun, they’re annoying. Secondly, if you want to watch incredible inventive trash, watch the 1988 film Disgusting Space Maggots Eat Everyone!!! on YouTube and demand a Criterion release; then, if you still want a werewolf movie, watch/rewatch Ginger Snaps; if you want to get trashier still, watch Bijou cited above.
Honourable mentions go to Scanners, a movie I’ve watched and loved many times over the last two decades, and, of course, Crash at the London Soundtrack Festival where I got to meet Holly in person!
In terms of incoming Christmas releases, I’m an out and proud Knives Out franchise fan so I’m very much looking forward to Wake Up Dead Man. I’ve had a weird relationship with the films of Rian Johnson. His first film, Brick, was released just as I came into my own as a film nerd - I still love it - but his follow up, The Brothers Bloom, did everything that could have been terrible about Brick. Looper is fun, but then he got the Star Wars gig. I thought I was a passionate defender of The Last Jedi but I tried rewatching it a month or two back and had to turn it off. When he did Knives Out, it was as if he found the movie he wanted to make all along: a contemporary take on Agatha Christie; moving away from the gloomy, pensive, contemporary crime genre. I swear the universal signifier for the contemporary crime genre is middle-aged actors, usually women, with crows feet standing under poor lighting:
I’ll likely rewatch The Whalebone Box because it’s the sort of film you can get away with watching at Christmas when you’re single and also it heals my heart. I think it might heal the whole world.
Series
I watched a surprising amount of television this year, or what passes as television (streaming services). My relationship with TV is strange in that, generally, I don’t have the time to invest in it. What that means is lots of series get recommended to me and, if I watch any at all, I’m late to the party. A friend told me about Blacklist sometime around 2017 and it stayed at the back of my mind.
When I found the mental bandwidth to watch a show, the thing that swung Blacklist was James Spader. I’ve written about Crash and I’m also a fan of 2002’s Secretary. Spader really was the go-to actor for transgressive cinema in the 90s and noughts. While he isn’t called on to do anything too dodgy in Blacklist, his character is as fun as the series itself: well constructed and engaging.
Alien: Earth was covered here.
I’ve finally gotten true crime as a genre. The little I’d seen missed the point. Or, more accurately, the conversations that surrounded the shows missed the point. Too many times I heard colleagues repeat the same pat responses: variations of, How can someone kill people? Imagine being in a room with them… It’s only so long until it starts to sound like they’re fantasising about being murder victims, which would bother me less if they actually admitted it and went out and got spanked or whatever instead of wasting their lives.
In any case, watching the Conversations with a Killer series, it’s hard to ignore how Dahmer or Gacy or Bundy’s cases intersected with the sexual politics of their times. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if LGBTQ+ folk were less stigmatised in the 80s and 90s. I don’t believe it would have stopped the crimes - these murderers are nothing more than severely mentally ill - and I guess in Dahmer’s case he was integrated into the gay community. There’s probably a postgrad thesis filed in a uni library somewhere. But anyway, when these series are at their best, they’re not about the killers but the victims’ surviving loved ones.
The best series I watched this year was The Andy Warhol Diaries. I thought I broadly knew Warhol’s career but had no idea how big a role he played in mainstream culture. He had his own TV show! The doc also gave me a deeper understanding of his abstract work, his collaborations with Basquiat and made me more gracious towards his repetitive screenprints.
Books
I read Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time. I know the films so well that, at the beginning, I struggled to unstick my imagination from Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen but, once the characters got out of The Shire, the narrative started to step out of sync with the movie and I settled in. I will, most likely, get through the whole trilogy in my own time.
I also read Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of bpNichol, edited by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts. It’s a must for any bpNichol fan, and the transcript of a lecture Nichol gave at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is invaluable.
I got to provide a blurb for Alex Mazey’s forthcoming RIVAL STREAMER : AI SLOP X BRAINROT (IN)FINITITY WARRIORS from Trickhouse Press. It’s the most inventive book of poetry I’ve read for a while, and I can’t wait for you guys to read it.
Finally, I tried to get my head around Nick Land this year. This was serendipitous since 2025 was when he blew up on the podcast scene. His appearances on The Dangerous Maybe and Theory Underground are top shelf. His appearances on explicitly rightwing podcasts are… You get what you get.
I wanted to write something substantial on him, to try and justify why the Left are fascinated by this figure with reactionary politics. I think the tension is, although he’s on the Right, his philosophical writings are anything but regressive. They’re cutting edge. It shows the Left where they’re going wrong, crowbarring Marx into the 21st century out of anxious religiosity.
I contend that, if readers want to get familiar with Land, they need to read Fanged Noumena and the collected CCRU writings that Urbanomics published (there’s a book 2 coming out in March, incidentally). In terms of the rightwing texts, they should probably read The Dark Enlightenment. It’s insufferably dull, but it’s also a concise and straight forward explanation of why the Right are on the Right.
I’m sure I read plenty of other books this year, but none to note besides Cute Accelerationism.
Personal
I’ve changed a lot this year. I’m more at peace with a lot of things that held me down in the past. Having a background where saying what you’re actually feeling was an existential threat, I’ve had to learn to… Say what I’m actually feeling. Not only articulate challenging life experiences, but say what my emotional response is to them. Even writing this paragraph feels like trying to contort my mouth to say a word I don’t know how to pronounce. The bad - but still kinda good - news is: you realise how not healing invites “red flag people” into your life; the good news is, once you heal, you’re in a position to have a better time.
Dating is the area of life that highlights this the most. I went on a couple of dates. On the second, she spent the meal typing on her phone and placed it flat right in front me to show a guy had been WhatsApping her selfies throughout. It’s clear in retrospect: she wasn’t interested but didn’t have the maturity to directly tell me there and then. I wasn’t cut up over her. Again, two dates. But I was forced to confront why I keep getting myself into these situations, with these types of people. As with past experiences, I could see all the red flags prior but didn’t/couldn’t admit it.
Being raised up the arse end of evangelical Christianity, congregants were taught that, because humans are inherently depraved, then feelings (presumably conflated with desires) must lead to sin. It was considered preferable to unquestionably accept what church leadership says about the Bible. Now, a curve ball: a common criticism that gets thrown at so-called “tragic life memoirs” is that authors portray their entire existence as a misery fest. I say, if a child has a rough home life it impacts everything. As an adult, it enables you to gravitate towards people who won’t recognise your feelings and for them to gravitate to you. With all this in mind: because of home and church, do you think school supported my feelings or shamed them? You get the idea as to why feelings is a big thing for me.
There might be times when The Emergency Kisses looks like an excuse to overshare or, worse, get free therapy, but its project has always been to remove critical commentary from the vacuum of academic cleanliness and reveal it as existing alongside personal experiences and cultural moments. Inversely, to show the autobiographical as contingent on the visceral, emotional, imaginal: a retort against the MFA-ification of autotheory and creative non-fiction, with their lilting crystalline sentences and endless supply of epiphanies. But also I’ve written enough critical pieces on here without the personal stuff, so this shouldn’t be an issue for readers.
While 2026 looks fertile for war and rumours of war, I think it’s best to remember we get to participate in life: that the reason we get so upset by injustices in the world is because we know life, life itself, is good. This incoming year sees the release of my next book of poetry from Atomic Bohemian as well as a new release by Sascha Engel from my own Hem Press.
I’m so grateful this Substack had, and continues to have, such a warm reception and continual growth. It’s funny to me that I, beavering away in my little corner of the indie lit world, started a Substack that barely ever talks about poetry. A whole swathe of you think my gig is writing about movies, which is a role I definitely accept (and might even prefer).
I thank you for staying with me this year. I wish you a Merry Christmas, and a great new year. Or is new year meant to be capitalised? I’m never entirely sure.