Good stuff from a hard year

Our reviewer offers top choices of film and TV that you can stream now

By Juan-Carlos Selznick

In the grimly challenging year of 2025, the “escapist” pleasures of the movies may have seemed, more than ever, one of the true necessities of life, at the same time that those pleasures were challenged by the tenor of the times, and much else. Here too, once again, the Stream & Dream lounge leaned toward an escapism geared more toward substantial discovery than to momentary distraction.

• Ethan Hawke delivers superb performances in two very different roles (the ailing composer in Blue Moon and the ramshackle countercultural reporter/detective in the picaresque series, The Lowdown).

• Emma Thompson thriving (and not showing her age) in action roles, especially in the Down Cemetery Road series but also in the stark survival adventure film Dead of Winter.

• Director Richard Linklater producing two of the very best films of the year — the above-mentioned Blue Moon as well as Nouvelle Vague, a Godard-style account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 New Wave classic, Breathless.

• Guillermo del Toro’s rapturous version of Frankenstein, a rather personal rendering of Mary Shelley’s classic that immerses itself in 19th Century Romanticism without seeming old fashioned.

• Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, a stark, multi-faceted account of an impending national defense catastrophe (a nuclear missile of unknown origin headed for a major US city) that is precise and fatalistic, in ways that are both intimate and detached.

• Good Boy — a gently spooky, live-action “ghost story” in which the central character is a dog who keeps noticing stuff in a darkened house. A DIY tour de force by filmmaker Bert Leonberg and his talented retriever, Indy.

• Josh O’Connor’s comic/ironic turn as a priest in the latest “Knives Out” comedy, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, caps off a recent streak of distinctive performances in a variety of roles — La Chimera, Challengers, The History of Sound, and best of all, Kelly Reichardt’s intriguingly offbeat Mastermind.

• Albert Serra’s weirdly compelling Afternoons of Solitude is a documentary portrait of a contemporary bullfighter in action. It is spectacular, clinical, and grimly poetic in its evocation of ancient savagery and ritual combined with the savoir faire of modern-day professionalism.

• Quirky sagacity prevailed in a whole bunch of very entertaining mixes of comedy, action, and character drama — Americana and Roofman are the Lounge favorites, but Caught Stealing, Splitsville, Mastermind, Psycho Therapy, Tokyo Cowboy, Amateur, Honey Don’t, Relay, and the Iranian caper, It Was Just an Accident, are no less worthy of special mention.

• “Get used to failing. You’re a loser.” Those seemingly discouraging words bespeak the clear-eyed bond and dedication of the Palestinian activist and the Israeli dissident who witness the Israeli army’s methodical destruction of a Gazan village in the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land.

• Deft adaptations of literary fiction were in welcome abundance in 2025. The films made from Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Stephen King’s Life of Chuck were personal favorites keeping admirable company with adaptations of classics — Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, del Toro’s Frankenstein, and The Return (with Ralph Fiennes as an aging Ulysses) — and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon adaptation, One Battle After Another.

• Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 is Raoul Peck’s brilliantly mounted documentary linking the alternate truths and “doublespeak” of Orwell’s 1984 to modern history and much more. One of the film’s coups resides in the connections, in word and image alike, that Peck makes with contemporary events and conflicts.

• “Eephus is a baseball movie unlike any other” ( CNR, 6/16/2025 ). It’s also one of the best movies of the year.

• Perfect Neighbor — a skillful compilation of video footage from body cams, doorbell cams, and other sources captures the dynamics of a neighborhood squabble that turns lethal. This ostensible true-crime narrative gravitates toward suburban noir with a powerful array of tragic paradoxes.

• The best westerns of the year were two very “cinematic” TV serials — American Primeval and Untamed. Season 2 of Taylor Sheridan’s much improved Texas oil epic, Landman, rates an honorable mention as well.

• With or without all those Oscar nominations, Sinners rates as one of the very best films of the year, maybe THE best.

Classic film in vintage format–DVD
• A DVD available for purchase from Undercrank Productions and with a ponderous title, Tom Tyler Silent Film Collection, is actually a lovely bit of movie history. The films included are two unexceptional silent era B westerns with Tyler in the lead role, each beautifully restored from 35mm prints housed in the Library of Congress. But these brilliant restorations give an exceptional gift — a first hand, up-close experience of early “movie magic,” thrillingly alive and well in even the most routine of circumstances.