We’re nearing the end of 2025, and in this video I look back on the year in cinema by sharing my favorite films—trying to keep it to 10, failing, and landing on 11 (plus a mountain of honorable mentions). I open with a late addition that genuinely surprised me: Eternity, a goofy-sounding afterlife premise that, for me, becomes a sincere rumination on how our choices lock out other lives and how we learn to embrace the one we got. From there I move through films that capture the absurdity of modern society, the strange ways we rationalize comfort, and the quiet terror of realizing how easily we can be shaped by systems we think we’re above. Along the way, I connect movies through themes that make for great double features: No Other Choice as a darkly exhilarating critique of lifestyle-enslavement; Roofman as a study in charisma, judgment, and consequences; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as a visceral portrait of overwhelm and solidarity; and Sorry, Baby as a tender, funny, painful depiction of trauma freezing time. I also talk about Train Dreams and its witness-like perspective on a life swallowed by history, my Cannes highlights (Sentimental Value and the much-missed kind of comedy Splitsville), the war-movie pairing of Warfare and 2000 Meters to Andrivvka, and I end with a film I already suspect will be a future classic: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—an epic that asks what it means to engage power, legacy, and the fight we can’t finish in our own lifetime.