This is what the Defector staff saw and enjoyed this year.
Eephus
There was a time when I could text a friend about getting a drink at 4:50 p.m. and be drinking that beer with them an hour later, but those friends now live in Minneapolis or Albany or comparatively remote parts of Queens, and they have children, and they don’t really drink like that anymore, and so on. I know that those days are long gone, but the spirit of how I lived then—the idea that there was no need to make plans in the way that old people do, because things would just happen—is still alive in me in annoying ways. I confront it every time I do some old-person stuff that, presumably through some kind of clerical error, happens to be exactly the type of shit I’m into now that I am also old.
This is how my wife and I wound up subscribers to the film program at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, where over the last year we have put our small but welcome discount to work seeing some extremely good movies alongside audiences that are so old, grumpy, and reliably out-of-pocket that they somehow make us feel young. It is cheating to say that the best film I saw this year was Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 giga-classic In the Mood for Love, because I had seen it before and because it is the most beautiful film I’ve ever seen, but we watched a magnificent new print of it in a packed house and I heard someone say, “So nothing happened?” as soon as the credits rolled. I can’t ask for more than that. I wouldn’t dare.
These both are and are not my people, is what I’m saying. They answered their phones right before Good One started and said “Whatever” after The Mastermind ended, and while none of that diminished my affection for both of those (very good) films, it also just became part of the experience. That the theaters were always full for these small, strange films was nice. Who am I to tell a septuagenarian what to make of a meticulously slow and deliberately inconsequential film about a New England men’s rec baseball game made for a few thousand dollars? Or to tell them not to answer their phones and say “I can’t talk, I’m at the movies,” during its brief running time? Not someone who would expect to be listened to, I can tell you that much.
We saw Carson Lund’s Eephus in a little, surprisingly full theater at Lincoln Center during the first cold weeks of spring training. My personal Baseball Levels were worryingly low at the time, and the film effortlessly and charmingly topped them up. Eephus did this not just because of the baseball onscreen—janky, effortful, and extremely fucking real in its representation of mostly middle-aged guys trying to play the game—but because of how astonishingly well the film managed to pitch and pace itself at baseball’s strange and specific frequency. It is a film about the passage of time, and it makes you feel it in the way that baseball itself does: by organizing itself very loosely, and then by turning the players loose to do whatever they want with that time. What I love about baseball, I loved about Eephus.
Films about baseball tend toward literality and corniness when they are explicitly about baseball, and can seem glib or cynical when they use baseball’s degrading cultural significance as a way to amplify whatever other cultural signal or political point the filmmaker finds more compelling. This isn’t any of that. It’s a bit of charming slow cinema about the last game played at a community diamond, between two teams of lumpy normal guys that have played each other many times. Players come and go; the game disintegrates but doesn’t end; the day passes, agreeably and in no rush, into night. That it all adds up to something—that it is, by the end, somehow meaningful despite itself—is something that couldn’t have happened any faster, and which cannot be rushed. Eephus gets baseball in a way that very few movies have, what makes it work for those of us that love it, but it also feels like baseball in a way that is unlike any other film I’ve seen. So nothing happened. Exactly. - David Roth
Sinners
Sinners is set in a very specific time and place, but it's also an Oakland movie. Ryan Coogler is from the Town, and Sinners premiered down the street from my house at the Grand Lake Theater. Local movie theaters were packed all spring. Like the best theatrical experiences, the screening I eventually went to at Grand Lake was rambunctious and communal. That's part of why I loved it so much.
Also, it's great. Coogler is an extremely talented filmmaker, though he's never been able to show off his vision in such an expansive way before. Sinners is Coogler's fifth feature, following his breakout Fruitvale Station and three successful, lauded adaptations of existing IP. I think it's fair then to read Sinners as a debut of sorts, not Ryan Coogler as a filmmaker but as a visionary. Given the realities of the studio system, directors, even those as gifted as Coogler, have to make other people's movies for a long time and then are only given the latitude and money to do their own thing if those adaptations are commercially successful. Sinners was the first time Coogler had both a budget and creative freedom—how would he use them?
To take a real swing. Sinners is nominally a vampire movie starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack. Back in the South from some time spent making money the old-fashioned way in Chicago (stealing it from the mob), they set up a juke joint, where, eventually, crazy stuff happens. One might watch the trailer, see the white vampires bearing banjos, and assume they were in for a somewhat straightforward film making the straightforward analogy between vampirism and white people's relationship to black music. Not at all. Coogler goes deeper, and while I don't want to reveal too much, I will say that there's a scene in the juke joint where Coogler crafts a hallucinatory montage connecting the 1930s-era blues music of the film backward and forward, situating it within an eternal lineage of black music. Said white vampires are also led by an explicitly Irish villain, affording him a more interesting and contested subjectivity vis-a-vis American white supremacy. My only complaint is that the climactic fight scene is hilariously brief. Ultimately, that's fine: You can go watch many Coogler-directed fight scenes in his other movies. - Patrick Redford
Secret Mall Apartment Inside The Secret Apartment Mall
I wrote a blog about it, so I won't go into the details too much here, but I'm revisiting it now because it was my very favorite kind of art experience: the kind that reveals layers underneath what you can see (in this case, literally) so completely that you can never see the thing the same way again. The story of Secret Mall Apartment—young artists trying and failing to fight the forces of gentrification—is delightful on its own, but seeing it at Providence Place Mall opened up a new part of the city to me in a way that made me feel wonder and awe. I never passed that mall again without thinking of the secret apartment inside it. I feel like so many of my end-of-year favorites are elegies for my time in Providence, but I feel so grateful to have spent a year in such a textured city, and I still miss it a lot. - Alex Sujong Laughlin
The Work Of David Lynch
In early February, I was at dinner with a friend who told me that the group chat she’s in where strangers share their dreams with each other had really been popping off ever since David Lynch died, a few weeks prior. Soon after, I had a dream where his face was on the paper money I was using, and I felt like I was subconsciously part of something bigger than myself.
I’m not indulging any supernatural explanations here, but during what felt like a particularly dark and surreal winter, I and so many others looked to the vast and unknowable worlds that Lynch created. I went through all of Twin Peaks, after a couple false starts when I was younger. I saw Wild At Heart, Fire Walk With Me, Blue Velvet, Inland Empire, and Lost Highway alongside likeminded people at various local theaters. And I got to dissect them all with electrifying excitement, week after week.
My opinions of Lynch’s work varies a lot. Mulholland Drive is one of my all-time favorites. Eraserhead is one of the most unpleasant viewing experiences I’ve ever had. The Fire Walk With Me scene in the pink room made an impression on me that’s never going away. Inland Empire is the most seriously I’ve ever considered walking out of a movie. But through all this watching and re-watching, I felt it do something to my brain as I explored his work so intently—escapism, in a way, but also wonder and awe at the fact that I was able to experience the fruits of such a creative, uncompromising intelligence. I feel forever changed, and grateful, for being able to engage with what he produced. - Lauren Theisen
28 Years Later
At some point in the long wait between 28 Weeks Later and 28 Years Later, I realized that I am completely in the bag for this franchise. This revelation was not brought about by rewatching 28 Days Later or its sequel, as I haven't seen either since their initial theatrical runs. Maybe the announcement of the 28 Years Later trilogy in the making sparked that love in me again, or maybe I remembered that I liked the original movie's take on the zombie apocalypse, a genre I tend to not care for. Whatever the reason, I was locked in for 28 Years Later, but even I wasn’t prepared for it to whip so much ass.
28 Years Later uses its time jump well from the start. While the first movie tackled the immediate aftermath of a virus outbreak that caused most people to turn into rage-fueled zombies, and the second faltered a bit in addressing the medium-term damage, the new movie feels lived-in. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Jodie Comer are parents in the wasteland of England, doing what they can to survive. Their son Spike, played by Alfie Williams, is precocious, and it’s clear he will get himself into some trouble when he accompanies his father into the mainland.
What starts as perhaps a simple zombie supply-run movie turns into a tender mother-son travelogue, as Spike tries to find a cure for whatever mystery ailment Comer’s Isla has. The mystery is that it’s cancer, but since there are no real doctors on the island where they live off the coast, they must find Dr. Ian Kelson, played by a very orange Ralph Fiennes. (The orange hue of his character is explained well enough, but it never gets less silly to look at.) Along the way to Kelson, the pair see zombies and escape from them, including one giant zombie who is just straight up hanging dong. Good for him. Kelson arrives just in time to save the duo by blow-darting the giant zombie with some form of zombie tranquilizer. They also find a pregnant infected woman, and help her deliver a baby that may or may not be a zombie—who knows? Either way, they take the baby with them to follow Kelson back to his home.
When they do arrive at Kelson’s sanctuary, the Bone Temple, there's a beautifully tragic sequence that I frankly did not expect from this movie. Danny Boyle is famously a sentimental filmmaker, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was so lulled into submission by the beautiful colors and brutal action that I didn’t expect a quiet moment with an orange man to be the one that stuck in my head for months.
And then there’s the ending! Normally, I am solidly against the franchise-building bullshit that movies in a post-Marvel world have to go through in order to sell the next one, but it’s hard for me to care when 2025 Horror MVP Jack O’Connell, previously seen as the vampire antagonist in Sinners, pops up as a lunatic chav with a band of acrobatic loons at his side. I have no idea where this series is going from here, with O’Connell’s Jimmy Crystal solidly in the middle of the action, but fuck it, bring on The Bone Temple. - Luis Paez-Pumar
Sasha Gordon’s Haze Solo Exhibition
I spent much of college loudly declaring to people that I didn’t “get” visual art, whatever that means. The sentiment faded, slightly, after a couple of visits to the surrealism exhibit of the Tate Modern with my roommate at the time, who was an art history major. As it turned out, I could “get” visual art when aided by historical and conceptual understanding of the movement. One of the first times I can remember seeing a painting in isolation as an adult and feeling wowed, aesthetically and emotionally, was when I encountered Sasha Gordon’s diptych, The Archer, years ago online. (The expressions! The colors! The details in the eye!)
Four years after I first texted one of Gordon’s Instagram posts to my friend, I finally got the chance to see her work in person, at a solo exhibition at David Zwirner studios in New York City. The exhibit in full contained a smaller painting upon entrance, a room that contained a series of three seemingly connected works (though the timeframe across the paintings is a bit subjective), and then a large room with about five large-scale works of art across its walls. I’m not that familiar with the private gallery scene, beyond some First Friday experiences in Philly’s Old City, but I found the experience of large white walls with large paintings getting a wall to themselves to be an ideal vessel for really taking in one artist’s work, especially for an artist like Gordon.
The sort of fleshy, honest reality of Gordon’s figures, and the richness of her lighting and colors, are all things that translate decently into image, but it is only in person that you can really appreciate the scale—I was compelled to take a photo of a stranger by one of her paintings, for size comparison—and detail of her work. The details! Blades of grass, eyelashes, the give of flesh under fingertips, the wrinkles of a foot in a high-heel shoe: Everything is so emotively realized, with a level of attention and notice given to even ordinary encounters and images, that anchors the unreal scenes rendered in her work. It’s just fantastic. I love to feel something moving through the world, once, and see it rendered days, months, years later, in an image I’ve never encountered before. I’d love to see the world, once, then see it again the way that Sasha Gordon sees it. - Kathryn Xu
The Interrogation Scene From Andor
Over its two full seasons, Andor has given us a number of perfectly executed scenes. But I wanted to isolate this one because of its minimalist approach. Here’s an indelible moment from the Star Wars universe that contains no light sabers, star battles, sassy droids, or space wizardry. It’s just two brilliant actors doing a scene together inside a shitty, anodyne conference room. We begin the scene with Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) in the center of the shot. Meero is a mid-ranking bureaucrat for the Empire who’s gone out of her way to commit atrocities on behalf of her superiors. But her ambitions have gotten the best of her, as they’ve just led to a high-ranking Rebel spy dying before she got the chance to extract valuable information out him. Meero knows she’s in deep shit.
Enter her boss, director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), from the door behind. At the beginning of this exchange, we only see the bottom of Krennic’s face. Meero, with her back still to the door, can’t see him at all. All she can hear is his voice: his curt, imperious, angry voice. She’s terrified of what she hears, and even more terrified at the prospect of having to look Krennic directly in the face. Director Alonso Ruizpalacios keeps Gough in the center of the frame throughout the beginning of this exchange, so that you, the viewer, are right in Meero’s headspace. You feel her fear, and you know she’s right to be terrified. When Krennic finally walks out in front of her, he gives her a line I’ll never forget:
“We found two years of Jedha working group printouts in your files.”
That line reads dry as a bone on paper, especially compared to the other juicy bits of dialogue that Gough and Mendelsohn get to chew on. It’s just office talk. But Mendelsohn infuses it with such anger, such OFFENSE, that you’ll never print out vital documents on your own ever again once you hear him say it. The best scenes are ones where you imagine yourself as one of the characters in it for years after. That’s me. I’ll go take a piss and become Krennic, enraged about those printouts.
Meero tries to argue her way out of trouble. She tells Krennic, correctly, that she HAD to overreach in order to make up for the Empire’s constant bungling. Meero is a good soldier. She believes not only in the Empire, but that she will be “rewarded” (her words in a previous episode) for her loyalty to it. She’s still clinging that illusion when Krennic walks back behind her and, in a moment improvised on set by Mendelsohn, jabs his forefinger down, HARD, into the top of Meero’s head. It’s an uncommonly violent gesture, even though no blood is shed. The reaction on Gough’s face is of someone who has been violated.
Once Krennic walks back in front of Gough’s Meero, she frantically tries to keep talking her way out of her fate. She stands up out of her chair, in a final effort to assert her authority. Krennic sits her back by grabbing her head with both hands and forcing her back into her seat. Another violation. Then he leaves and Meero is left knowing, for certain, that she’s fucked. She did everything right. Better than her bosses would have done it, in fact. But the truth doesn’t matter. The Empire doesn’t give a shit about Meero. Or about Krennic, as we find out in Rogue One, the film the spawned Andor. Employees like Meero and Krennic don’t exist to be rewarded by the Empire, but to be scapegoated by it and then discarded. There’s an analogy in this, but only if you consider what’s happening in America 2025 to be a novel development in human behavior.
I got all of that from just from that one scene. You don’t need fancy visual effects, or a budget in the hundreds of millions, to make a lasting impression on your audience. You just need brilliant writing, acting, and direction. This sequence contains all three of those things. - Drew Magary
Ludwig
Police procedurals generally blow because of all the subliminal messages about the cops always being smarter and better than everyone else, but Ludwig managed somehow to turn that on its head by casting the non-imposing scene stealer David Mitchell as a cop who isn't a cop, but is the twin brother of a cop who is never seen and might actually be a victim, because why else would David Mitchell be a convincing crime solver?
As it turns out, he is a puzzle master who uses the pseudonym Ludwig. His twin brother is a highly regarded murder detective who goes missing, and Ludwig is asked by his pushy sister-in-law (Anna Maxwell Martin) to solve the matter of his disappearance. Over six episodes, Mitchell is of course confused for his brother and dragooned into solving other murders with his brother's partner (Dipo Ola) and associated aides (Gerran Howell and Izuka Hoyle), simply by using his powers of puzzle-powered deductive reasoning. It's Columbo meets Sherlock Holmes meets Will Shortz in a happily strange convergence over six episodes, and there are six more planned for 2026. Spoiler alert: The head cop is a careerist villain, in case you're wondering if it might be too reverential to law-n-order. Further spoiler alert: It's David Mitchell, so it cannot be anything but delightful. - Ray Ratto
One Battle After Another
I saw One Battle After Another on a random Friday morning, lucky in having the day off from work and that the theater closest to me was also showing the movie in VistaVision, as god and Paul Thomas Anderson intended. I had timed my screening almost too perfectly: Walking into the theater, I had to run to my seat, the opening minutes of the movie had shot right past me while I was waiting to get popcorn, and I would spend nearly three hours holding on for life.
This movie was absolute jet fuel. I can't think of anything I've watched in a while that was not just propulsive, but absolutely ferocious in how it captivates you. The cinematography is so rich, even at the edges of the frame, and PTA gives the story a balance that feels gritty but almost like a fairy tale. The sequence where three skateboarders try to ferry Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob Ferguson out of Baktan Cross is as indelible to me as Peter Pan teaching Wendy and her brothers how to fly. The final car chase had me literally on the edge of my seat. What was just as startling was how funny the movie was, not just DiCaprio fully inhabiting revolutionary-turned-vape merchant Bob, but how PTA created a tableau that reached for Thomas Pynchon's comedic register.
The movie was far from perfect. Regina Hall was criminally underused, and Teyana Taylor's performance felt more like the nuclear blast of everything she summoned rather than what was written on the page. PTA was clearly trying to work through some things about fatherhood and the threats to black women in this country, and even in that at-times messy attempt, I still give him credit. If I can sympathize with anything right now, it's that dads don't always get it right, but they have to keep trying. I was out on the streets doing the Scorsese "ABSOLUTE CINEMA" meme all the same afterward. I give it 300 stars and a few small beers. - Justin Ellis
Days Of Heaven
I spent much of 2025 in a self-directed movie education program. My friend Dana helped me make a Letterboxd list of 100 movies she thought I should have seen by now at my big age, and I had only seen eight of them. What an embarrassment! As a result, I have watched more movies this year than any year of my life. And because I am working from Dana's curated list and my own watchlist, I enter most of these movies blindly. All I know is whatever short blurb is at the top of the movie's description, and that it has been vetted and declared good. This is how I accidentally came to watch my best three-movie stretch: All the President's Men (1976) followed by Road House (1989), followed by Dick (1999). We really used to be a country!
I have enjoyed most of the movies I have watched, but one feeling that is rare for me to receive from most forms of art other than the novel is the rare sensation that I have been gutted like a fish by a story. These are the pieces of art that make me sit in silence for a little while after the story ends, that haunt me in my waking and sleeping hours, whose emotional cores are so dense and specific that they attach themselves to me forever.
I watched Days of Heaven (1978) in the first week of October, and I still don't know how to talk about it. I have heard movie people talk about Terrence Malick (who wrote and directed it) for years without any context, and now suddenly the reverence makes sense. The shots of the sky. The wheat blowing in the wind. The descent of the locusts. The miserable wedding. I can still feel the emptiness that grew inside my body when it finished. I hope to one day be able to describe it. - Kelsey McKinney
Raúl de Nieves’s In Light Of Innocence At Pioneer Works
As someone who is both queer and a non-believer, I have never felt totally comfortable in churches or with the concept of organized religion. And yet I have a profound obsession with objects of divinity, particularly stained glass. It is hard to walk into an old cathedral and not believe in something like God, a mosaic of colored lights beaming down on you and dazzling the floor.
It was immediately apparent, then, how different it felt to walk into Raúl de Nieves’s solo show, In Light of Innocence, at Pioneer Works. It was like going into a church made by and for the gays. Nieves transformed the venue’s brick hall into a cathedral, the large windows replaced with neon acetate resembling stained glass. The panels depict various figures inspired by tarot—the hanged man, as well as many other queens and kings—in jeweled colors, spangling the floor with jeweled light. Many of the figures are accompanied by enormous flies, creatures we often associate with disgust and yet help ferry us and all other living creatures between the realms of life and death. It felt sacred to wander the hall like a pansy-turned-parishioner at some campy gay church and open myself to being moved, whether spiritually or artistically or aesthetically, by Nieves’s queer cathedral.
Several of the stained glass panels were emblazoned with phrases, which took on an exalted nature. Some referenced ACT UP and Félix González-Torres, others quoted Cher: “WORDS ARE LIKE WEAPONS THEY WOUND SOMETIMES.” My favorite simply read “AND WE ARE HERE TO CONTEMPLATE THE WONDERS OF LIFE,” adorned by a single fly. On a cold November afternoon, watching the setting sun coruscate through the colored shards of acetate, I felt like that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing—not just in this exhibition, but in my greater existence, and I felt grateful to Raúl de Nieves for this most sacred reminder. - Sabrina Imbler
Twin Peaks: The Return At Metrograph
There are a few celebrity deaths that could truly gut me to my very soul. Two of them happened in this shitty year: D'Angelo and David Lynch. When Lynch died, there were so many retrospectives and screenings hosted throughout NYC: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me at the IFC, Mulholland Drive at Lincoln Center, Wild at Heart at the Roxy. It was a beautiful time.
The retrospective that will stick with me the most is Metrograph's screening of all 18 episodes of 2017's Twin Peaks: The Return on the big screen for the first time. I remember being there at that operatic theater, its giant screen surrounded by Twin Peaks diehards, and watching one of the last idiosyncratic, glorious, blank-check monuments of the last decade in glorious surround sound. The sounds are what I savored the most. I remember that being a big thing for Lynch at the time, that it was important to listen to the series loud to capture all the sound design choices he made. To hear it in a big theater made the scary scenes scarier and the confusing scenes more confusing.
There are obvious episodes that benefited from the big screen treatment: Episode 8 and its atomic bomb sequence, Episode 3 and Dale's cosmic journey through "non-existence," and the final episode in all its craziness. But I loved watching the smaller moments on the big screen, too: Big Ed eating soup in silence, the last moments of the log lady, and whatever was going on with Audrey Horne. And being with an audience of superfans made the experience even better. We laughed where we should, we were shocked when we were supposed to be. We erupted when Dale Cooper said, "I am the FBI," and we walked out of there in a complete silent daze after Sheryl Lee's final scream. It was an exuberant reminder of the power of great art, and the joy and pain that Lynch has given us through his lifetime. A perfect celebration of his life. - Israel Daramola
When Bob Put The Baby In The Laundry In One Battle After Another
First time I had been to a theater in eight months, heavily in sleep debt, arrived three minutes late to an annoyingly prompt screening, watched the entire opening set piece crouched in the aisle so as not to disturb the sold-out crowd, settled in to my seat next to friends and realized, to my mild surprise, right as the edible began to hit beautifully (eight months off that, too), that this was simply a girl-dad movie with political set dressing. When Bob tossed the baby into the laundry hamper in the backseat and started driving, I felt that urgency in my bones. I realized, in that instant, that all art with these themes will now "hit different," and I was able to cleanly perceive the emotional core of One Battle After Another as if with newly granted X-ray vision. I will never have that much fun in a movie theater again. - Giri Nathan
Flow
Flow was the only movie I saw this year. I liked it. - Barry Petchesky
