2025 culture favorites.

the movies, TV series, books, & albums I loved in 2025

Happy end-of-year-list season! This week, my favorites from art & culture. (Next week, a reflection on my work/personal happenings of the year.)

A note on the curation: First, obviously, I stuck to things that were released in 2025. Second - these are my favorites, I’m not declaring what is or isn’t “the best of” the year. 2025 did not bring me a press pass to film fests (but crossing my fingers for 2026), so there are still a number of films that are getting buzz that I haven’t yet been able to see. I’m sure some of those would be included. And ditto for books, movies, and TV. Because I write about it for the newsletter, I treat media consumption as a sort of part-time job, but I just can’t match the same quantity as the full-time critics. This is what I loved from the relatively small (okay, medium) pool I swam in. <3

FILMS

Sorry, Baby

Honestly, obsessed. A favorite of the year and maybe of the decade. I’m resharing my initial review, in full.

Something bad happened to Agnes. This is what we know at the start of Sorry, Baby, the new A24 film from former Reductress writer and content creator, Eva Victor. We meet Agnes during a visit she gets from her best friend, Lydie (a lovely Naomi Ackie), with whom she went to grad school. Agnes still teaches at the small rural liberal arts college where she and Lydie got their PhDs. The tenor of the cryptic “bad thing”— along with dialogue that reveals a male professor had made an abrupt exit—make it pretty clear that Agnes experienced some kind of sexual violence during her program. Act Two of the film confirms this — an awful and tragically common experience unfolds wherein Agnes’s advisor, Decker, coerces and then forces her into sex. We do not see a second of this on screen; instead we witness, from the outside, the house where it happens (the professor conveniently needed to reschedule their meeting from his office to his home). The early evening turns to dark, the house lights turn on, the streets get quiet, and then suddenly Agnes is rushing out the door, carrying the shoes she doesn’t want to stay inside to put on. Next we are in Agnes and Lydie’s home, where Agnes explains what happened in choppy detail; Lydie holds this, affirms this, offers comfort. Act Three and Four are the aftermath: a mix of healing moments with a gentle but sort of dopey neighbor, enriching teaching moments, coupled with triggers, activations, and a panic attack. At the end of the film, Lydie and her partner (E.R. Fightmaster) are visiting Agnes with their new baby. During a moment Agnes and the baby are alone together, Agnes delivers a casual but stunning speech that probably won Victor the screenwriting award at Sundance. Bad things happen sometimes, Agnes explains, “it’s just like that sometimes. Sorry, baby.”

I am certain I would have been marveled by this film regardless of my background as an academic, but it didn’t hurt that this story was extremely familiar. I, thankfully, have never been raped by an academic advisor, but my dissertation advisor was accused of sexual harassment and was in a sexual harassment suit during my last year. It was awful for everyone. As an undergrad, I did have a sexual relationship with a different professor (beginning a week after class ended), but I still, to this day, do not feel harmed by that experience. I do think it is, as Isle McElroy put it in their sharp Sorry, Baby essay, “loser shit” on the part of the professor who hit on me. But I was fine, it was seriously a tiny nothing blip in my relationship history. Sorry, Baby is interested in nuance like this. There is no doubt that what Decker did was horrific and that it has led to unshakable lingering trauma for Agnes, but in one decidedly abolitionist scene in the film, Agnes explains that she doesn’t want Decker to go to jail, she just wants him to stop being a person who would do what he did. If he went to jail, he would just be a person who does something like that “but he’d be in jail,” Agnes explains. We also learn later that a different grad student had consensual sex with Decker; she feels fine. None of that takes away from the truth of it: Decker raped Agnes, and it wasn’t okay. This delicate presentation of complexity in situations of sexual violence didn’t detract from the magnitude of the harm—instead, it legitimized the severity of an experience in its specificity. I genuinely believe we need more of this in our collective approach to combatting sexual violence—treating everything as black and white is a disservice to actually addressing the particular needs of victims.

In not showing the actual moment of rape, Sorry, Baby does something profound: it requires us to believe Agnes without proof. And just as importantly, it protects the audience from a potential moment of re-traumatization. The entire movie is exceedingly gentle; we feel held by Lydie, we feel comfort in Agnes’s new kitten, we feel grateful that Agnes’s new boyfriend-type-person always asks permission. And in the moments we are confronted with the aftermath of trauma, we know there will be places to turn (for Agnes, and for ourselves). Unlike recent “feminist” films like Promising Young Woman and Blink Twice, both which include absolutely brutal scenes of rape and other forms of violence, Sorry, Baby doesn’t make a spectacle of Agnes’s pain. Films that show horrific scenes of sexual violence in the name of keeping women safe remind me of Andrea Dworkin. Dworkin tried to protect women by giving speeches full of the most horrific details you could possibly imagine, traumatizing audiences, and also dehumanizing the women (especially sex workers) she spoke about. It is genuinely baffling to me how people think it’s feminist to show rape scenes in movies, but think it’s anti-feminist to show a woman enjoying rough sex in porn. BAFFLING.

But I digress; back to Sorry, Baby. Victor is refusing easy trauma porn in favor of a lingering tale of a multifaceted woman’s life. A life that persevered before, during, and after a traumatic event. The slow, Kelly Reichardt-esque film style reminds us of not just the banality of evil, but also the banality of healing. Before, during, and after the rape, Agnes puts on boots, feeds her cat, has a best friend. What a powerful reminder for all of us who find ourselves processing the unthinkable while still having to brush our teeth, go to the grocery store. So many of us holding a horror, so many of us who just keep going.

This movie is a miracle, and I am so grateful it exists.

One Battle After Another

Sorry not sorry! I saw this twice. Here’s an excerpt from my initial review.

“...To be clear, I do not think Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another makes revolution irresistible. In fact, if I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, it is because he is so hyper-aware of his absolute futility as a Hollywood director to be a driver of radical social change that he includes Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as a central reference-point for the characters. And it is once I leaned into my own advice to not expect nor look for revolutionary guidance from Hollywood that I was able to take the movie for what it was: an absolutely phenomenal film featuring extremely shallow engagement with radical movements and ideas that allows for a moment of cultural discourse to center around questions related to liberation struggles. And I, for one, am fucking here for that.”

Die My Love

Especially when looking back at the buzziest films of 2025, I start to appreciate Die My Love even more. It was a pretty dude-heavy year (surprise surprise) and this film felt fun and painful and wild and woman-centric. HORRIBLE B-PLOT, but otherwise….loved???

“But in Die My Love—despite being full of incredibly uncomfortable moments and intensely distressing outbursts of psychosis—I loved being in it. (Admittedly, that started to wane about 20 minutes before the ending, but I think that was likely intentional). I loved seeing Jennifer Lawrence crawl around like a cat, lick glass, I loved seeing Robert Pattinson be all at once a concerned husband and an asshole who was not doing enough to support his wife and child. I loved seeing Sissy Spacek represent Jackson’s mother as a new widower who both understood Grace’s motherly rage and also deeply grieved her own (likely sometimes shitty) late husband. Some reviewers think all of this was flat and cliche, but I still found depth here. At the risk of sounding essentialist, something I kept thinking throughout the film was: this was clearly made by a woman. That’s not even to say that I think it captured postpartum so well (I am not a mom to a human child, so I have no ability to say), but just that I felt somehow more held in the distress than I did in, say, Bugonia.

Additionally, the stylistic choices were glorious. The soundtrack (and specifically the volume of it) was a character in the story, the colors were incredible (the night scenes were dystopic dreamlands), the jumpscares….”

Honorable mentions: Bugonia (as my friend N astutely notes, Yorgos is an edgelord, but this movie is great despite his provocations; also: Jessie Plemons 4ever); Come See Me in the Good Light (bring yr tissues </3); Sinners (duh); The Smashing Machine (should have been better, but I feel very tender about The Rock’s performance!); Materialists (I get the critiques, but I am too romantic and too working-class for this not to vibe with me!); Pee-Wee as Himself (<3). Others I enjoyed thinking about (and look for my reviews of most of them on my TikTok): Train Dreams; Frankenstein; Sentimental Value; After the Hunt.

TELEVISION

Dying for Sex

Well, this gutted me. Based on a podcast series of the same name, the show follows Molly (an always-elegant Michelle Williams), who, after receiving a Stage IV cancer diagnosis, leaves her marriage to explore her sexuality through kink. Her best friend, Nikki (an excellent Jeni Slate), steps in to be her main caretaker. The show is a bit tonally all over the place (some raucous comedy and some deeply intense drama), but what a testament to (end of) life. It was a sexy, funny, painful, joyous, and deeply loving portrayal of friendship, desire, and mortality. I can’t recommend it enough.

Task

Sunday night HBO got its groove back with Task, baby! Mark Ruffalo plays Tom, an ex-priest-turned-FBI agent who has just endured a majorly traumatic event—his adopted son, in an episode of psychosis, murdered Tom’s wife. But he’s called back into work to investigate a series of robberies targeting a local gang. Thus assembles his team of hardworking Aleah (Thuso Mbedu), scattered-but-dedicated Alison (Elizabeth Stover), and charming and savvy Grasso (Fabien Frankel). Meanwhile, we get to know the “bad guys,” who are, of course, not bad at all, just down-on-their-luck garbage men, one of whom lost a brother to the gang in question. Robbie, played by the magnetic and indelible Tom Pelphrey, is the father of two young children who are mostly raised by his niece, Maeve (an excellent, mullet-clad Emilia Jones), the daughter of his late brother. There are other characters in the wings—Tom’s entire grieving family, the FBI boss (an always-watchable Martha Plimpton), the entire biker gang (these characters fell flattest to me, but Jamie McShane did a very good job as the villain), and Sam (Ben Doherty) the sweetest, gentlest child whose parents Robbie accidentally kills. Tom chases Robbie and Robbie tries to figure out how to protect the people he loves.

Both men are navigating grief, fatherhood, and faith, which sounds a little cheesy, but Ingelsby’s writing makes it poignant and intimate without getting saccharine. Ruffalo and Pelphrey do an exquisite job demonstrating male pain without it veering into a boring Suffering Man trope, or at least I didn’t need to read it as such. My heart was full of both these characters, in all of their loving warmth and terrible mistakes. It is for certain the most moving show I’ve watched this year and maybe in the last several years. If you like classic Prestige HBO, give this one a shot.

Hunting Wives

This show was a ROMP. A campy, soapy story about MAGA-coded MILFs in Texas who are disproportionately bisexual and who love their guns enough to use them, and on humans if necessary. I mean, that sounds bad, right, but somehow it is NOT BAD. It is the opposite of bad— it is SO GOOD. The plot develops through the fish out of water: Sophie, a New England girl transplanted to Texas because her husband got a job with an oil tycoon. They are East Coast Liberals™ but Hubs really wants Sophie to try to fit in. So, she does, by shtooping Margo, the oil tycoon’s gorgeous seductive wife. To be fair, Margo seduces most people around her, and Sophie is only human. Meanwhile, the teen girl dating the son of one of the women in the MILF crew is found shot to death in the woods. From there we are launched into a classic murder mystery, but one that is punctuated with deranged sex (laudatory), tradwife-meets-Vegas clothes, and every Texan cliche you can think of (mechanical bull-riding! so many shot guns! cowboy hats!). The real thrill of this is that the script is actually good; this does not feel like AI Netflix slop, it feels like a substantive genre series, and I can’t wait for season 2.

Very honorable mentions: The Pitt! It’s a little tokenistic, but otherwise, incredibly moving, with unreal-good performances; Hacks! Season 3 started pretty weak but ended EXCEPTIONALLY. The last episode had me crying and cheering. Also very happy to root for a show starring an actress who is unapologetically in support of Palestine and against ICE. The Studio; another industry show that I—someone not in the industry, but aspirationally adjacent—really enjoyed. Classic comedy antics & fun inside baseball that lay people can still tap into. The second episode was excruciating gold.

ALBUMS

Snocaps (Snocaps)

From my initial review: At an event last week where I was in conversation with Dan DiPiero about his new book, Big Feelings: Quer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, I said something along the lines of feeling about new Waxahatchee albums the way it seems Swifties feel about Taylor’s releases. This goes for any project Katie Crutchfield is a part of, not just her solo stuff, which makes sense because I first fell in music-love with her not through Waxahatchee, but through P.S. Eliot, the band she had with her sister, Allison Crutchfield, in the late 2000s. P.S. Eliot was this incredible blend of the twee bedroom indie-pop I’d been obsessing over all through college, but with a few extra layers—some pop punk, some grunge. It was, as Dan describes in Big Feelings (of which P.S. Eliot is an early example), “this combination of beautiful and boisterous….simultaneously bitter and sweet, because it’s made from every feeling and memory and relationship and place and thought articulated or not, every exuberance and heartbreak and banality and tenderness and violence and experience of the whole bundle’s transience, already gone.” Yes, that.

I often used to shorthand P.S. Eliot, early Waxahatchee, Emily Jane Powers, Mirah, and others in the early and slightly pre-Big Feelings genre Dan describes like this: “it sounds like the way my heart feels.” This gritty punky girly glory that was like a mirror. It’s music that Dan describes as inspiring Lauren Berlant’s concept of “good non-sovereignty,” which is a sort of agentic relinquishing of control. “We give up control because we desire to be attached —to the music, to the feelings elicited by it, to one another.” (That’s Dan again, buy the book.)

Anyway, guess who dropped a surprise album on Halloween? Katie and Allison Crutchfield, now in a new band formation called Snocaps (also featuring MJ Lenderman). Reader when I tell you I cried, I mean I really cried. I adore Katie’s turn to country in her more recent Waxahatchee albums, and that sounds like a part of my heart too, but with Snocaps the Crutchfield sisters are back to their gravelly punk roots and all of a sudden I was in my 20s again. Katie said this about the process: “Every aspect of this project has felt nostalgic in a sense that it felt direct and joyful and easy. Allison and I synced up on a shared vision for the first time in forever, starting a band with our dear friends, keeping it all simple, realigning with the earliest, purest versions of our music-making selves.” Nostalgic, joyful, easy, purest version of ourselves; yes, that’s how this album feels.

Ken Pomeroy (Cruel Joke)

Ken Pomeroy is a Cherokee singer-songwriter from Oklahoma who stole my heart when I heard her on the Twisters soundtrack. I’m shocked every day that she’s not a bigger name. At just 22-years-old, she brings a soulful depth to some of the prettiest and saddest country songs ever played. I am awed by her voice, her lyrics, and the haunting gorgeous sounds she makes on her guitar. Cruel Joke is her third full-length album, and I love her first two albums just as much. My favorites on this 2025 release are “Days Getting Darker,” “Cicadas,” and “Coyote,” a heartbreaking duet with John Moreland.

Wednesday (Bleeds)

Wednesday (another Big Feelings band) is making me hopeful that they will have the kind of staying power of a band like Big Thief. Every album is as good or better than the last. I absolutely adore their blend of classic indie rock with absolute unhinged, 90s-harkening grungey screams and epic roars. On Bleeds we get a little more country (surely in part thanks to the addition of MJ Lenderman), which obviously delighted me. My favorites on the album show the farthest ends of the spectrum on which the album exists: the delightful back porch diddy, “Elderberry Wine” and the gutteral rock screaming that ends “Pick Up That Knife.” Ugh, so good!

More-than-honorable mention, because these were all absolute bangers: Bon Iver (SABLE, fABLE); Bad Bunny (DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS); Emily Jane Powers (Earnest Jamming Partners); Chance the Rapper (Star Line); Big Thief (Double Infinity); Carmen Perry (Eyes Like a Mirror); Joshua Burnside (Teeth of Time); Samia (Bloodless); S.G. Goodman (Planting by the Signs)

BOOKS

Love in a Fucked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook-Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade

I have thought about this book nearly everyday since January. In a highly accessible, smart, and engaging little read, Dean takes the best of self-help, removes the really shitty aspects of it (the racism, classism, ableism, the neoliberal bootstrapism), and encourages us “to do work simultaneously both inside ourselves and against our oppressors.” Dean addresses so many common patterns and familiar experiences: trying to numb alienation through romantic (or other) highs; putting unfair expectations on an individual partner; letting childhood trauma hijack our nervous systems in romantic, friend, and movement relationships; putting blame on people or groups without asking how we contributed to a particular dynamic; and so on. Dean’s background in prison abolition and transformative justice spaces is evident in how much compassion he brings to his advice—-he refuses to do the neolib self-help thing of blaming individuals, insists on illuminating the context for why people do things that are out of alignment with their values, and also says we have responsibility to reduce the harm we bring to our relationships and communities. A common misunderstanding of abolition & TJ movements is that we’re only about forgiving people for doing bad things, but actually it’s a movement that says we need to learn how to stop hurting each other, and in the meantime set up barriers to protect ourselves from harm without the state. Dean’s book gets into practical tools for learning to stop hurting each other. Essential work!

Touch Me, I’m Sick: A Memoir in Essays by Margeaux Feldman

Was lucky enough to help doula this book into the world as Margeaux’s writing coach. Blurbed it too! “In Touch Me, I’m Sick, Margeaux Feldman explores cultural responses to trauma and illness through a brilliant tapestry of research, criticism, and narrative. At once impressively rigorous and deeply personal, Feldman’s gorgeous debut is a love letter and a guide toward radical care, healing, and belonging.”

Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance by Ben Passmore

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot since picking it up a couple months ago. A stunning and detailed graphic novel charting Black resistance in the US from slave rebellions through the riotous aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Graphic novels are not my go-to, but when I spend time with them, I always feel such reverence for the artist-writers. They have to put so much thought into each frame, it’s truly remarkable. And the history lessons throughout Passmore’s latest are inspiring and indispensable.

Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl by Dan DiPiero

As you can see from my Snocaps review above, I loved this book! Also blurbed it! “Big Feelings is a gorgeously written, fiercely intelligent exploration of the emotional landscapes salient in a beloved niche of contemporary indie music. Blending music theory, cultural studies, and personal narrative, DiPiero rigorously considers the intersections of sound, selfhood, and queer/feminist (be)longing. From lo-fi bedroom ballads to riotous distortion, DiPiero theorizes a distinct affective tenor that sets apart the millennial and Gen Z music so many of us passionately obsess over. This book is all at once an indispensable subculture history, a necessary intersectional lens on a traditionally white genre, and a love letter to the kind of music that hits in our bones. A must-read for anyone who takes seriously femme feelings and the possibilities of the melodic noise that carries them.”

Also!!: Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis; Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood; The Guerilla Feminist: A Search for Belonging Online & Offline by Lachrista Greco; Thank You, John by Michelle Gurule; First Time Long Time by Amy Silverberg; Why Christians Should be Leftists by Phil Christman.

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Okay, your turn! What did you love this year?