The 10 Best Movies I Saw in 2025

As always, this is my listing of what I think were the best movies I saw in the past calendar year, not necessarily movies that came out during that year.

The Apartment was one of the films Melissa and I saw this year through the Wichita Orpheum's 2025 Anniversary Film Series, a monthly event that we've fallen in love with (and we can't wait for the 2026 series to begin; it's going to be great!). As for the movie itself, what can I say? This 65-year-old film is as funny, as sharp, as observant, as dark, as real a romantic fantasy of adult sex and love and longing as any romantic comedy I can think of. Given its whole mise-en-scène--New York City corporate office culture in the late 1950s--I can't imagine a better way of telling its story, or a better cast to do so. Billy Wilder knocked it out of the park.

Sometimes you want to see a movie that is a stagey one-hander, just a straight-up bit of focused, funny, sad, outrageous story-telling, presented in an enclosed environment within a defined period of time: a play, in other words. Blue Moon is all that; a movie about plays and musicals, about the words that can make performances on the stage truly play and sing, and about one of the greatest writers of such words ever. Ethan Hawke's Lorenz Hart is an amazing character, and carries the whole film.

Dog Day Afternoon is 50 years old this year (yes, another Wichita Orpheum anniversary film viewing), and I wouldn't change a thing about it. Yes, if we wanted to recreate today the story of this ridiculous, tragic, farcical attempted bank robbery from the summer of 1972, the racial, sexual, ethnic, and LGBTQ aspects of the story would be approached very differently. But would doing so had made the film more of a document of its time and place: urban America in the 1970s, as the social democratic aspirations of the New Deal are clearly collapsing under the weight of bureaucracy and diversity, but the homogenizing effects of finance and global capitalism and technology had not yet fully taken root? I don't think so.

Flow was the most beautiful thing I saw on screen this year, hands down. A wordless, apocalyptic fantasy that gives us, through ordinary animals struggling to survive, something fabulously human: heroism, suffering, possessiveness, guilt, suspicion, nobility, and more. A tremendous accomplishment in visual communication, and the sort of thing that shows what animated story-telling really can--and should--be.

As I have argued many, many times over the years on this blog, President James Earl Carter, Jr., was one of a kind. While neither a transformative genius nor someone particularly good at holding onto and wielding the power inherent in being a President of the United States, he was, nonetheless, something of a miracle: a genuinely good man who managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole of artifice, image, and money that is American politics. There is much which explains his ability to get to such a point and still be capable of articulating, in an embarrassingly sincere language, what he understood about peace, decency, fairness, and work--but one part of the explanation has to be that Jimmy Carter, probably unlike almost every other modern occupant of the White House, actually listened to the radio, and could relate, as ordinary radio-listeners do, to what he heard. He loved the radio, and the folk, pop, country, blues, jazz, and rock-n-roll stars he loved returned this appreciation. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President isn't a deeply critical work, but it tells an essential story: a story about a man who came along at a time when America's cultural exhaustion hadn't yet been commodified, and who enabled artists as diverse as Gregg Allman, Paul Simon, Willie Nelson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, and more to feel something new about their country. And that's just beautiful.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a terrific, depressing story, told in ways that sometimes veer into biopic conventionality, but that other times becomes janglingly real. The creepy scenes with Martin Sheen's J. Edgar Hoover, oozing a frightening racist pretension, and the powerful scenes between Daniel Kaluuya's Fred Hampton and Dominic Fishback's Deborah Johnson, negotiating their relationship as violence and fate weigh them down--all of them, and more, are absolutely brilliant, so much so that sometimes LaKeith Stanfield's William O'Neal, the "Judas" of the title, is overshadowed. But that lack of balance doesn't stop it from being an utterly compelling drama.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is delightfully cast, beautifully shot, full of sequences that charmed (Sharon Tate watching herself on the screen in the movie theater) and deeply unnerved (Cliff Booth exploring the cult-occupied Spahn Ranch) and completely satisfied (Rick Dalton improvising and pulling off a great scene as a bad guy in a cheap television Western pilot). For all that, I realized about halfway through that it was something I'm not sure I'd seen before--an actually small Tarantino movie, a Tarantino story that wasn't sprawling out of control with themes and subplots and hints and pretensions. I need to re-watch Jackie Brown, which I've told everyone for years was my favorite Tarantino movie, and it was--but maybe its contained narrative was matched, or even improved upon, by this one? Anyway, a great, fun, even kind of humble fantasy of a cinematic story.

I wasn't a particularly big fan of Pee-Wee Herman; Paul Reubens's comic creation was absolutely capable of tickling my funny bone (I remember watching his 1985 appearance as host on Saturday Night Live, something touched upon briefly--and somewhat bitterly--in this documentary, and laughing my ass off as he minced through the studio audience, re-naming everyone in such a weird manner), but his shtick just wasn't my own. Still, it was a great shtick, and worth honoring. Pee-Wee As Himself does that incisively. Paul Reubens was always trying to exercise control over his image, and variations on the theme of control--his intense friendships and resentments with other actors and artists in his circle, his devotion to his mostly hidden nature retreat in the Hollywood Hills, his willingness to exit and then return to the closet as a gay man as his career demanded, and most of all the incredible work and detail that went into shaping his artistic vehicles--define the whole movie. Overall, a delightful document of the comedy, punk, and avant-garde art scenes in LA in the 1970s and 80s, and one of the most distinctive members they ever produced.

Sing Sing is a heartfelt, thoughtful, honest, and delightfully--meaning painfully--realized story. At first I thought that perhaps I was watching some kind of tone poem, a film about something desperately sad that people live through and find moments of joy and triumph in nonetheless, like the early films of David Gordon Green. But developments later in the film made it more conventional, though no less affecting for all that. A wonderful, tear-jerking--but organically realized--celebration of art and humanity.

This comic-book Gen X geek has no notes, folks; Superman is straight-up one of the best super-hero movies I've ever seen. James Gunn's DC cinematic universe is, on the basis of this one film, going to dispense with many of the science-fiction and espionage thriller tropes that shaped, so successfully, Marvel movies for more than a decade, and in the place of a lot of that earnest attention to the dramatic, simply stipulating that aliens and meta-humans and super-heroes and everything else is part of the fabric of the world, and has been for centuries. This is not the comic book sensibility made real; this is reality made comic booky, and it delights me. Nearly 50 years ago--back when the character of Superman was barely 40 years old, as oppose to nearly a century now--writers, performers, and filmmakers cinematically realized this hero in a way that drew upon a sense of continuity from throughout the twentieth century; this Superman is part of a 21st-century reinvention, and so long as Gunn keeps his passionate, moralistic, geekily funny version of Clark Kent at the center of his movie universe, I will absolutely be along for the ride.

Becky Elder, a Local Kansas Matriarch (and More)

Last week, on a clear and cold Friday afternoon, I joined a couple of hundred other people to attend, and pay our respects during, the graveside service of Rebecca Love “Becky” Elder, at Elderslie Farm, her family’s property in Kechi. She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss.

I can’t remember when I first met Becky; it was likely a few years after my family moved to Wichita and I began teaching at Friends University in 2006. I know I was definitely aware of her by 2011; by that I time I had, after a slow start, begun to involve myself in local associations and arguments—I think my presentation on populism at the Wichita Pachyderm Club might have been one that really caught Becky’s eye—and as I became more familiar with different people, projects, and programs throughout Sedgwick County, I discovered that she and her family members were a thread which could connect almost all of them. People that knew Becky well could run down the same list of local endeavors she had her fingerprints on which my memory is calling up, and no doubt add many more to it: the Eighth Day Institute, the New Symposium, SunnyDale Community Library, the Friends University Neighborhood Garden (the only one of all these where my involvement actually preceded hers), Jubilee Presbyterian Church, and most importantly, Northfield School for the Liberal Arts.

The closest and broadest associations Becky had, at least from my observations outside the immediate Elder family and their church communities, were those that sprung, one way or another, from Northfield. Becky’s long crusade on behalf of home schooling, independent schooling, classical schools, micro-schools, and a half-dozen other overlapping alternative educational visions was central to her public identity. Becky's visionary aspirations perhaps put her more in the position of being an entrepreneur of teaching rather than a full-timer teacher herself, but as someone who has made the latter his career, my admiration for her skill with students is boundless. She was one of the purest believers in the ability of people to embrace the history, tradition, language, and culture they have inherited, simultaneously critique it, and through doing so make it part of their own civic and spiritual formation—the classical notion of humanitas--that I have ever known. While I never heard her quote it—and she quoted lots of authors, be they philosophers, theologians, economists, sociologists or more, to say nothing of dozens of figures from the literary canon—I cannot think of anyone I have known through all my decades in the classroom who more deeply embraced, as both a pedagogy and a telos, Goethe’s great celebration of self-discovery, and thereby self-revelation, from Faust:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last;

Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.

 

(What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire anew, if you would possess it.

What is not used is but a load to bear;

But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.)

 

My wife and I were products of the public schools, meaning our education was not one informed by such classical assumptions and discipline. That doesn’t mean we were ignorant of the limitations of the public schooling model, with its centralized and standardized curricula and bureaucratic disciplinary regimes; my mother turned to home schooling my younger siblings soon after I left home, and that legacy has shaped the education of most of my nieces and nephews. Still, Melissa and I never considered any approach besides the public one for our own children, perhaps in part because we always felt relatively successful in working with the schools our daughters attended, finding ways to preserve the localist and familial elements that are always present in any actually neighborhood school, or at least so we both believed. (The fact that, once we settled here in Wichita, we bought a home where our children could easily walk or bike to their elementary, middle, and high schools was certainly a part of this.)

As I wrote over 20 years ago, at a time when our four children were still in the midst of their public schooling journeys, “I like the idea of the state being a partial agent of education.” Why? Because the liberal democratic order—whatever its many flaws as manifested in the United States—can and, I think, usually does add an egalitarian element to one’s education, and by so doing complement and enrich the traditions one receives from home and community. Too often the personal development which an embrace of one’s individual inheritance makes possible is warped by our globalized capitalist world into just one more instantiation of meritocracy; structurally weaving the imperatives of liberal egalitarianism into the mass public educational ideal can preserve something truly civic, at least as much as the classic ideal may.

All this, of course, meant that Becky and I had some very deep disagreements when it came to schooling. And yet those disagreements never got in the way of us conversing—always curiously and joyfully—about the potential for neighborhoods to reflect, and provide foundations for, the plurality of ways in which people can learn and grow, and thereby sustain one another, their communities, and their natural environments. She embraced and was always looking to share with her students and me and anyone else who would listen those authors and intellectual models who tied their stories to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that made real localism possible. She was instinctively sympathetic to deeply Kansan anti-government, anti-union attitudes she had inherited from her family, but she took up those arguments in a populist, even radical way. In that way, her Old Right libertarianism and my anarcho-socialism met on common ground. The first time I was invited to speak at Northfield (back when the school met in the old Love Box warehouse on 37^th St. in north Wichita), I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment; but after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages, conversations which had ranged from town meetings to backyard gardens to the interstate highway system to oil monopolies to climate change to do-it-yourself-tractor repair, I saw the truth: Becky Elder was a hippie. God bless her for it.

The hippies get a bad rap, to be sure, and much of it is deserved; so much of the counter-culture a half-century or more ago turned its back upon tradition entirely, and assumed that a new civilization could be simply willed into existence, through communes and co-ops, from the ground up. And too many of the wrong lessons of that counter-cultural vision continue to inform the transhuman delusions of the Silicon Valley elite, whose understanding of the DIY mentality focuses more on venture capital and AI technology than practical crafts and community sharing. But the best aspects of hippie-dom, especially when conjoined with the kind of deep Christian faith and agrarian practice that Becky’s whole existence reflected, are profoundly wise. It is a good thing to insist on developing real local knowledge, on breaking away from larger systems and getting down on one’s knees instead, whether to weed a garden or pray to God or read a text closely (or ideally, all three). While the political culture of Kansas may on the surface may seem to be anything but friendly to this kind of deep, loving, local engagement, I think that Becky’s example of rooted, trusting, make-it-up-as-you-go-along activism actually only adds to our state’s long tradition of local matriarchs making the most of the soil and situation around them, and making history as they do so.

I’m thinking here of Mary Skubitz, a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas who was brought to the coal mining country of Crawford County by her parents as a child in 1890. Decades later, she helped organize other wives and mothers into the “Amazon Army” of 1921, a mass protest of women, marching from mine to mine, facing armed threats from the owners, demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the mines. Or I’m thinking of Minnie Wish-Ken-O, a Potawatomie woman in Jackson County who took up the leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, in the midst of the dissolution and despair brought on by drought and the Dust Bowl, and from her farm led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal re-organization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, my colleague Ken Spurgeon has resurrected—through his film Sod and Stubble—the story of Rosa Hagg Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband Henry and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s. The frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education, and her children in turn graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in America (as well as telling their mother’s story in what became an early Kansas classic). Unsurprisingly, education is a constant in so many of these stories—which just brings us around to Becky again. Her great-grandmother, Eldora Dugan Love, settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, Eldora published a women’s journal which made educational and religious improvement its central message. And three generations later, that message continues on.

Towards the conclusion of Becky’s graveside service, the pastor invoked Becky’s commitment to “place,” both in terms of landed particularity (the family had made arrangements beforehand, in accordance with Kansas state law, to bury Becky without embalmment on her own property, which they did), and in terms of an attitude towards our part of God’s plan—loving where we are planted, and looking forward to that heavenly place of love and grace where we can reside after our earthly sojourns end. As I watched her body lowered by her sons into the grave, I could help but think of my own mother’s recent passing, and also think of how this great matriarch of the Elder clan was still teaching. By example, she was showing us how one puts down roots, and becomes part of an ever-growing, ever-revealing bounteous creation. She lived a Kansas life, and a Christian life, and a life that found and shared freedom and opportunity and insight in fertile minds and fertile ground. What could be more graceful, and more local, than that?

 

 

 

Listening to Lennon #8: Milk and Honey (Plus, a Summary)

John Lennon was murdered 45 years ago this evening, on December 8, 1980. The photo attached was taken that afternoon--ghoulishly, but entirely coincidentally, it includes the face of Mark Chapman, his assassin, who had been hanging around outside the apartment John and Yoko had lived in for the past five years, along with all the journalists and photographers who dogged Lennon constantly, hoping to get an autograph. Lennon obliged. (I've clipped Chapman out of the photo.)

Lennon was shot by Chapman after returning to his apartment with Yoko after hours in the studio, recording and polishing a song by Yoko, "Walking on Thin Ice." Like several of her tracks on both Double Fantasy and Milk and Honey, the final, posthumous release of original music by Lennon, Yoko was merging her avant-garde musical sensibilities with post-punk and post-disco styles, making use of synthesizers and drum machines in a way that didn't make her music that foreign to what would soon be called "New Wave" on early 1980s American radio. That doesn't mean the song itself is very good, despite Lennon apparently declaring in the studio, perhaps less than a hour before his murder, that "you just cut your first number one, Yoko." By my hearing, Yoko's better stuff was, appropriately, that which she released in conjunction with her husband's final tracks. That's not the only reason to take Milk and Honey seriously, though.

I wasn't looking forward to listening to this album. I figured that, even if I give Yoko the benefit of the doubt and assume that she genuinely believed these left-over tracks from the Double Fantasy sessions were good enough to be deserving of public release, as a way to honor her late husband and his legions of fans, the results couldn't possibly avoid feeling like a cash grab. Well, I was wrong; Milk and Honey feels instead like a definite studio production in it's own right. Not a perfect one; it definitely has some filler on it among John's stuff. "(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess" is an unfinished, sappy ditty, and "Grow Old With Me" is a weak demo recording of a song of great, but completely unrealized, potential. But the energy and wit that Double Fantasy showed Lennon re-embracing after years away from the studio are very much on display on "I'm Stepping Out" (a delightfully poppy number), "I Don't Wanna Face It" (a slick, bluesy rocker), and especially "Nobody Told Me," easily one of the smartest, catchiest, grooviest pop songs that Lennon ever recorded in his entire career, solo or with the Beatles; why it wasn't on Double Fantasy in the place of one of the weaker tracks like "Cleanup Time" makes no sense to me at all. And then there's "Borrowed Time," an underproduced recording that manages to be charming and unintentionally haunting at the same time. 

And as for Yoko? While her tracks aren't in dialogue with John's as happens in the best parts of Double Fantasy--which would have been truly perverse if she'd tried, since she went to work on this album in 1983--several of them stand up as solid, if sometimes slight, dance and electronica-pop. "Sleepness Night" has too much of her patented (and often tired) transgressiveness to really be enjoyable, and "O' Sanity" is just silly, but "Don't Be Scared" is an actually compelling little mystery of a song, "Your Hands" is a dreamlike ballad, "Let Me Count the Ways" remarkably actually makes me see Yoko as a mother singing a lullaby to Sean, and "You're the One," with it's spooky compelling cricket chirps, should have been a single: I would put it alongside some of the best weird pop put out by Blondie, Kate Bush, or Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Overall, I give Milk and Honey a B+, the same as Double Fantasy, something I definitely did not expect. Which means that if we rank all of Lennon's, and Lennon and Ono's, post-Beatles albums together, it looks something like this:

Rock 'n' Roll: A

Imagine: A- 

Double Fantasy: B+

Milk and Honey: B+

Plastic Ono Band: B 

Walls and Bridges: B

Mind Games: B-

Some Time in New York City: D+ 

In retrospect, when I compare this list to my summary of Paul McCartney's far larger -post-Beatles output (23 albums at the time I wrote that review, and I wasn't even counting everything he'd put out--including leaving aside two cover albums which this journey though John's work made me go back and review properly), I think I've been nicer to John than he deserves. But then again--perhaps Paul's own constant output simply invites unfair comparisons? Who knows how I would have felt about Macca if he'd slowed down, been less of omnipresent workhorse? But it's not as though I could ever truly ask for less from Paul, the Best Beatle. And similarly, I'd give just about anything if John, the First Beatle, could have been spared, and we could have heard more from him. A tragedy, in so many ways. But he left his mark, both through his band and on his own--and, crucially, through the artistic and emotional impact he had on work of his greatest partners. On the day he died, in the final interview he gave, John commented "There’s only two artists I’ve ever worked with for more than one night’s stand, as it were: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. I think that’s a pretty damned good choice." I couldn't possibly disagree.