2025 in Review -- Movies

I've made "Top Movie Lists" every year for a while now. But in the past five-or-so years, I haven't always made them "Top 10" lists. I won't be doing so this year either. Before I explain why, some basic stats:

I seem to have settled in at watching about 50 to 60 movies each year. I was exactly on the low end of that in 2025 with 50 movies. I caught 31 at home, 14 at a movie theater, 1 at the symphony, and (in an unusual record for me) 4 on airplanes.

Of everything I saw, 20 were actual 2025 releases. From a field of that size, listing the "best half" (top 10) I happened to see isn't always going to make sense. I won't pretend to claim that Drop was one of the 10 best movies of 2025 -- even if, for a fluffy writer's exercise of suspense in a confined space, it did work well as in-flight entertainment. That's why this year's list is going to be very short; while I generally enjoyed most of what I saw, there are really just four movies that I want to call out as "worth seeing, if you haven't":

1. Weapons
2. Presence
3. Black Bag
4. KPop Demon Hunters 

None of these are going to be Oscar nominees. (Though if KPop Demon Hunters doesn't win Best Animated Feature...?) But I think they're all wildly entertaining, each in their own way.

As usual, I do plan to circle back and add to this list if I catch up on any other 2025 releases that feel deserving. But also, I'm so far avoiding most of the Oscar bait. During award season last year, I took a now-rare moment to bother writing a negative review, specifically about The Substance. In my comments, I noted that the movie may finally have broken me of the urge to see things I'm actively disinterested in only because they're in the award conversation. We'll see if that holds.

2025 in Review -- Games

Time for my annual look at the board games I played in 2025. Unlike 2024, I did not pursue a "10 x 10" (10 games each played 10 times). It's likely unrelated, but I also rose 50 plays to 327 games played in the year. (I'll talk about a bit of an asterisk on that in a bit.) I played 80 different titles (up from 75).

As always, these caveats apply:

• I don't count the games made by my work if I played them for work (in unfinished forms). 

• There are a few games that I count "by the session," like The Crew and the Exit: The Game Advent Calendar. (You might take issue with one game I don't count this way, as I'll discuss in a moment).

Here's my 2025 List:  

82    The Gang
13    Secret Hitler
12    The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game
11    Exit: The Game – Advent Calendar: The Missing Hollywood Star
11    Sky Team
10    Forest Shuffle
9    Avatar: The Last Airbender – Aang's Destiny
9    Fromage
8    Alibis
7    Phantom Ink
7    Vivo
6    Bohnanza
6    The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
6    Finspan
6    Kokopelli
5    Cities
5    Clever Cubed
5    Wine Cellar
4    Distilled
4    Grand Central Skyport
4    Invincible: The Hero-Building Game
4    The Quacks of Quedlinburg
4    Viticulture World: Cooperative Expansion
3    Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig
3    Concordia Venus
3    Merlin
3    Positano
3    So Clover!
3    The Taverns of Tiefenthal
3    That's Pretty Clever!
3    Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West
3    Windmill Valley
2    Azul: Master Chocolatier
2    Cascadia
2    Cascadia: Rolling Rivers
2    Clank! Catacombs
2    Clever 4Ever
2    Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle
2    Just One
2    Kathmandu
2    Luthier
2    Old London Bridge
2    Pirates of Maracaibo
2    Trinket Trove
2    Turing Machine
2    Wingspan
1    Aquatica
1    Celestia
1    Coloma
1    The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine
1    Decrypto
1    Dune: Imperium
1    Dying Message
1    Foundations of Metropolis
1    Galileo Galilei
1    The Great Split
1    Kabuki Tricks
1    Link City
1    Majesty: For the Realm
1    Medieval Academy
1    Memoarrr!
1    Mistwind
1    New York Zoo
1    No Loose Ends
1    Obsession
1    Ra
1    Red Outpost
1    Scout
1    SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
1    Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon
1    Skara Brae
1    The Speicherstadt
1    Strasbourg
1    Tabriz
1    Tangram City
1    Time to Panic
1    Tír na nÓg
1    Twice as Clever!
1    Wild Tiled West
1    World Wonders

My miscellaneous observations on these results: 

• 2025 was "The Year of the Co-op Game." The Gang, The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, the Exit Advent Calendar, Sky Team, Avatar, Alibis, and more... at 157 total plays, cooperative games made up nearly half of everything I played in 2025. (And adding team games carries it well over the halfway mark.)

• But most especially, The Gang. The cooperative poker game was by far my most played game -- and I'm not tired of playing it. Now, if I recorded plays of The Crew "by the hand," I surely would have logged numbers that high in previous years. But with The Crew, you're not going to finish a campaign playthrough in one sitting. It feels natural to me to deal as many hands as we care to play in an evening, then log that as one play. With The Gang, you explicitly win or lose in a "best of five hands" format, and that feels to me worthy of its own separately logged play. Maybe I won't feel the same when The Gang becomes my most played game again in 2026 -- I'm pretty much betting right now that it will. We'll see.

• I enjoyed The Fellowship of the Ring Trick-Taking Game, but we played it through exactly once and then never revisited it. Given the post-campaign staying power that both versions of The Crew had (especially Mission Deep Sea), it's safe to say I don't like it as much.

• Another campaign game without staying power was Avatar: The Last Airbender -- Aang's Destiny. It's a reskin of Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (without the J.K. Rowling baggage). But in my view, the few tweaks it makes to distinguish itself don't ultimately work in its favor. It was fun to play the campaign, and we haven't visited it since. I never blogged about Avatar; perhaps it's worthy of a post of its own at some point.

• My favorite new game of 2025 was definitely Vivo. With its fast run time and novel take on trick-taking, I think it'll stick around for more in 2026.

• There were 17 different games that I played for the first and so far only time in 2025. Of those, the ones I'd most like to visit again in 2026 include Galileo Galilei, Kabuki Tricks, Red Outpost, and Shackleton Base.

 I'm looking forward to more fun and games in 2026.

2025 in Review -- Television

Happy new year, everyone! Now that the calendar year has rolled over, I'm bringing you the first of my "best of" posts for 2025. I'm going to start with television. (Now that I'm doing that one for the third time, I think it can be called an annual tradition.) Here are the 10 best 2025 shows I watched, with some honorable mentions.

10) Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (Season 3) I'm probably fudging things a little to sneak this onto my list. There seems to be wide agreement that season 3 wasn't as good as the first two... but that's in part because those first two seasons set such a high bar. We still got 10 reliably "good" episodes, even if none were all-time greats. It's bonkers that they're ending this show after an abbreviated season 5. (Nearly as bonkers as it is to realize that there have been as many different Star Trek series in the last decade as there were in the 50 years before that.)

9) Only Murders in the Building. (Season 5) This show has always been reliably fun, with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez making a surprisingly entertaining trio. Season 5 marked an unexpected creative resurgence, with one of the show's more clever mysteries, escalating personal stakes, and smart casting of several conventionally dramatic actors in more comedic roles. There's still juice to squeeze from this fruit. 

8) Ghosts. (Seasons 4 and 5) This network show is still doing things "old school," with a 20-episode season running from September to May. So maybe it's something of a cheat to take parts of two different seasons (that ran in calendar year 2025) and give that a slot on this list. But I think the writers keep finding fun stories to tell with their big ensemble cast, and I keep laughing out loud every episode. I used to be unsure who my favorite character on the show was, but it's no contest anymore: Rebecca Wisocky is a comedy assassin as Hetty.

7) A Man on the Inside. (Seasons 2) This Ted Danson vehicle followed up a warm and funny season 1 with an even better season 2. As with any Michael Schur TV show, this one is great at balancing jokes with genuine sentiment. And even though season 2 moved from the retirement home to a new setting, the story found clever ways to incorporate favorite characters from the first season.

6) Alien: Earth. (Season 1) Series creator Noah Hawley achieved what had for over a decade now seemed impossible: he made an Alien prequel that was actually good. Alien: Earth was a perfect blend of honoring what was great about the original and building out the story with more evil corporate scheming and terrifying monsters. I don't know that I've ever truly looked forward to a new installment of the Alien franchise, but now I will for season 2 of this show. 

5) Paradise. (Season 1) From Dan Fogelman, the man who with This Is Us made a Lost-like puzzle box out of a family drama (but with actual answers!), comes another puzzle box in the form of a post-apocalyptic mystery. That's a more expected blend, but Paradise is anything but "conventional." Sterling K. Brown is the intense lead of this intense suspense-thriller. And season 2 is just a few months away.

4) Poker Face. (Season 2) I've decided I will watch anything Natasha Lyonne is in. I'll be sorry that it won't be new episodes of this fantastic homage to Columbo, but I'm glad we got as much as we did. (Yes, I've heard the rumors that creator Rian Johnson wants to reboot the show somewhere with Peter Dinklage as the star. That sounds great too!) 

3) Slow Horses. (Season 5) We're running out "Slough House" books by Mick Herron, but this is great fun while it lasts. Pretty much the only shortcoming of season 5 was how prominently it featured a "best in small doses" secondary character who seems better used as comic relief. But for as long as Gary Oldman wants to keep playing Jackson Lamb (with the rest of this exceptional cast), I'll be there.

2) Pluribus. (Season 1) I reviewed this show very recently, so I don't have more to add. I'll just reiterate that it's a perfect union of great writing and acting, a high sci-fi concept that's also easy to understand, and superb production that hides how incredibly difficult it must have been to make everything work. If there wasn't one more show that even more perfectly met the moment, Pluribus would be an easy #1.

1) Star Wars: Andor. (Season 2) The conclusion of Andor was as satisfying as fans of season one dared to hope it would be. Andor was indisputably the best Star Wars television show, and pretty much the perfect television show for right now, regardless of genre. It's impossible to completely set aside childhood nostalgia for the original movie trilogy, of course... but if I could, I'd probably admit it's the best Star Wars, period.

And a few honorable mentions:

• Season 2 of Silo straddled both 2024 and 2025. Because I put it in my top 10 list for 2024, I omitted it here. But had it been in contention, I'd have given it the #5 slot.

• Stranger Things was never as good as it was in its first blockbuster season, but season 5 was the best since then. It heightened and highlighted all of the best things about the show, with hugely emotional scenes giving the young cast its biggest chance ever to shine -- with especially great moments throughout the season for Finn Wolfhard, Sadie Sink, Maya Hawke, and Noah Schnapp. (Genre TV rarely gets Emmy award, but I say Schnapp in particular deserves it.) The season also highlighted everything... let's say less than great about the show, like wild intuitive leaps to progress plot, and dead end story lines to occupy characters from its sprawling cast. (Adding Linda Hamilton to do basically nothing was especially egregious.) Overall though, the finale itself felt to me like it "understood the assignment" and went out on a high. 

• Because of strange contract provisions or something, the 10 episodes of South Park released in 2025 were officially billed as two back-to-back five episode seasons, 27 and 28. Collectively, they were a scorching parody of the political state of things in the United States. I did feel some diminishing returns as the ongoing story rolled along... but I still laughed.

• I kept hearing I needed to watch The Studio and The Pitt. I never got around to either, if you're wondering why they're not on my list. 

Looking ahead to 2026, I'm anticipating more Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (and, to a lesser degree, the imminent debut of Starfleet Academy). Speaking of "scorching parody," we'll have the final season of The Boys. We'll have two different seasons of Game of Thrones spin-offs -- and no, that's not as exciting as it may once have been, but I won't pretend I'm not going to watch. Plus, other shows previously in my top 10 lists are bringing new seasons, including Paradise, Shrinking, and Slow Horses.

So much to watch, so little time...