TEDERICK.COM

The Best of 2025

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by

tederick
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Coming at you on a Monday this week, in advance of 3VATAR, Stranger Things, and Xmas. I hope all of you and yours are keeping well and — on this subject, more below, but — I thank you sincerely for being here, reading this.

No top ten list this year. No exhaustive accounting, by medium, of what I did and what it felt like when I did it. Let’s put it all together, instead: the brightest of bright spots. The best of the year.

Andor

(Tony Gilroy, Disney+)

Not just the final crest of the wave of the initial Disney Star Wars project (a.k.a. the Kennedy Years); arguably the final crest of Peak TV, too. This was a great year for television, dispelling fears that the great contraction will (imminently) quell this quarter-century’s definitive popular art. But even so, it’s hard to imagine another era in the medium’s lifespan throwing so much spaghetti at so many walls and, more importantly, funding the shit out of whatever it thinks might stick. $650M of someone else’s money to create the century’s signature artistic statement so far on fascism and resistance? Tony Gilroy should get a Nobel Prize just for walking into the room, let alone for how much shit he ransacked on his way out of it. Inspired, and (more importantly) inspiring.

(My writing on the series, available to subscribers: here.)

Assorted Crisis Events

(Deniz Camp & Eric Zawadski, Image Comics)

At 7 issues thus far, the architecture of Camp and Zwadski’s project may not be fully known… and perhaps it won’t ever be. Say instead that we here have an anthology of science fiction stories, one per issue, each set in a world in which the end has come and the multiverse is collapsing. Each issue is a for the most part self-contained and generally a treasure. Enjoy in particular #3, in which one town from two versions of reality are compelled to cohabitate.

Eyes Wide Shut: The Criterion Collection

(4K, Criterion)

Criterion released (at least) 3 discs I’d consider essential to any physical media collection this year; Eyes Wide Shut edges Sorcerer by a nose, thanks to the superb, nuanced transfer and a deep, deep bench of extras. (The third release was Anora, btw, which is bloody lovely.) Did you know that Criterion codes are stackable? Next time there’s a sale, use ’em!

Hide and Seek

(Su Friedrich, independent)

Not a 2025 film, but I’m freestyling a bit here. The most powerful experience I had watching a movie not-of-this-year was this buried gem, lovingly curated by the Criterion Channel in 2025. (It’s no longer on the platform as of this writing, unfortunately. Here’s hoping for a disc release at some point down the road.) As I continue to drill deeper and deeper on the unanswerable question of my own interrupted gender development as an adolescent, Hide & Seek arrived to show me a world I could sense but not see, making me feel robbed and grateful at the same time.

Iron Widow & Heavenly Tyrant

(Xiran Jay Zhao, Penguin)

Also not a 2025 release — though Heavenly Tyrant, released in the final week of 2024, comes close. Doesn’t matter: these books knocked my socks off this year. I got the weird kind of obsessed that was once reserved for other, larger series. These are as vivid, vicious, and entirely their own thing as you’d ever want from a piece of creative fiction. Xiran Jay Zhao is my new hero, authorwise — maybe they are my “best of 2025.”

Ncuti Gatwa

(the Fifteenth Doctor)

I haven’t been able to return to the Fifteenth Doctor yet. The experience feels fractured in my mind — not only because of the abortive, wholly unexpected ending; the entire experience of “Disney does Doctor Who” somehow turned out even more surreal and unappealing than one would expect, having read those words. But I will happily declare with my whole chest that Gatwa was a revelation (well, to anyone who didn’t watch Sex Eductation) as the Fifteenth Doctor, the very definition of a performance guiding its franchise, rather than the other way around. It’s been a defining year for Nos. 1 on the callsheets (Rhea Seehorn; Diego Luna; Seth Rogen) but Gatwa, a decade-plus younger than any of ’em, brought Gen Z verve to the ambassadorship and — better — joy with him, everywhere he went. I may not be the most discerning DW fan out there (I kinda just like all of it, sorry!!), but I’d have taken another fifty stories of Fifteen, on top of the paltry eighteen we got.

Netflix

(it’s a streaming platform)

Not to go all Marie Kondo on this thing, and recognizing that folks’ feelings are a bit churned up about all this at the moment… but does anyone remember when a streaming platform — as a product — might also have sparked joy? Neither do I, but I don’t mind when opening an app creates something other than revulsion. This year — to my astonishment — that crown went to Netflix. After staying away from them for three years, I’ve gotta say: coming back to the “studio” that gave us Adolescence, Forever, Wednesday 2, Stranger Things 5, the Titan documentary, the Grenfell fire documentary, Train Dreams, Wake Up Dead Man and K-Pop Demon Hunters… kinda ruled. Warner had a better year for movies, but no one else had a better year for entertainment. (Netflix’s answer, of course: “Why not both?“)

One Battle After Another

(Paul Thomas Anderson, Warner Brothers)

Cinema, so long declared dead by this writer and others, has not felt so alive in a very long while, based on which films hit in 2025 — not “became hits,” not “hit theatres,” but hit, embedding themselves in the cultural psyche in a way we perhaps have not seen since at least before the pandemic, if not since before the turn of the century. If Francis Coppola was right and if, for a movie to be great, it must contain 5 memorable scenes or sequences, One Battle After Another has about 38, from the very large (the Duel-ish final, uh, duel between Willa and the Christmas-loving white supremacist chasing her) to the absorbingly tiny (Bob’s brief, exhilarated whistle when two dudes by the side of the road, who have no need to help him besides their shared humanity, point him in the right direction). Gorgeously framed for the big-BIG-screen experience, having been lensed in the very definition of a dead format (VistaVision), One Battle couldn’t have arrived at a better moment in our history.

The Rose Field

(Philip Pullman, Penguin Random House)

We come to things at the right moment, or sometimes the wrong ones: I had a difficult time with The Secret Commonwealth, book 2 in Philip Pullman’s follow-up trilogy to (my favourite series of all time), His Dark Materials. Re-reading Commonwealth now I have no idea what I ever found wrong with it, other than that something about it disturbed me, and that the disturbance might instead have been a spirit unready for the honest questions the book was, in part, asking about the schism between the soul and the self. Well, I must have come along way since 2019. By the time book 3, The Rose Field, was in my hands this October, I was as ready for it as I’ve ever been to read anything; and it did not, in any chapter, page, or sentence, disappoint. Lyra: forever.

Sinners

(Ryan Coogler, Warner Brothers)

Coogler aims for Nolan’s vacated MVP slot at Warner and, to no one’s surprise, hits. He is now one of the most valuable filmmakers alive, in America or any other country; his corpus, five films long and growing, is a study in the machinery of this art form in the 21st century. It would be easy to argue that Sinners is his best work; it would also be easy to argue that any films in Coogler’s project connect at a level of clarity few other filmmakers have yet to sustain. In a year of fabulous ensemble casts, the indelible onscreen lightning of Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, not one but two Michael B. Jordans, and Delroy freakin’ Lindo stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Woodworking

(Emily St. James, Crooked Media Reads)

A coming-out novel, a passing novel, a story of queer community, a tale of mentorship-in-reverse, a transgender adventure story, an Odd Couple comedy, and all shot through with some of the most crackling dialogue of the year. You have met these characters when you are done Emily St. James’ first novel. This was the book, having read it, that I immediately bought another copy of, just to lend it to anyone I thought might like it.

Honourable mentions

Something that occurred to me the other day was the pleasant realization that I have more things to watch, read, play, and do than I’ll have time for in the rest of my life. I’m sure, to some, this would be anxiety-inducing. To me it just feels like a wealth of choice. This is an embroidered way of saying (as of this writing) I haven’t even cracked the NEON box yet; I have by no means seen or read “everything”; and I never will. All the selections above and below are, thereby, provisional.

More Movies:

  • My “final” Letterboxd list of the best of 2025 is still being added to
  • The list where I keep track of everything I watched from previous years for the first time, that I enjoyed (woof, a mouthful), is here
  • In an era when visual effects have become for all intents and purposes interchangeable in mainstream entertainment, I was deeply impressed by what ILM was able to do with TRON: Ares. That’s magnificent visual art.
  • And in a category he’s dominated more times than I can count, he does it again: the one-two punch of Ludwig Goransson’s score for Sinners, and the film’s accompanying album, were the best soundtrack of the year.

More TV:

I also keep a Letterboxd list of the TV that I watched in a given year; here’s 2025’s. Other shows I really loved not mentioned above are:

More Reading:

I wasn’t going to do link recos in this post, but can I give you just one? If you’re anything like me and you’re heading into a week anything like mine, this piece about the holidays by Anne Helen Petersen is well worth your time.

Other things I loved reading this year, many of which were physical objects:

  • Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza (Peter Beinart)
  • Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams)
  • The Deviant (James Tynion IV, Joshua Hixson)
  • The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates)
  • The Reframe (A.R. Moxon)
  • Shiny Things (Norm Wilner)
  • Universal Monsters: The Mummy (Faith Erin Hicks)

Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods

My short story You Are What You Eat was published by the Genre Society. As the e-magazine format can be a little hard to parse depending on your device, I’ve added the complete text to the original post here.

I also wrote a Star Wars short story, as I am wont to do. It won’t be published anywhere else. I love it quite a bit.

Speaking of Star Wars, my video, “What We Lost With The Vintage Collection,” did numbers, as the children say.

This one didn’t do numbers ,but it was fun to make.

On Screen Anarchy, I really like this one, where I revisited Jean de Florette.

On the blobslettewg, I…

Now for the news: in 2026, the cost of an annual subscription to my newsletter is increasing, from $5 a year to $6 a year. Perhaps you’d like to subscribe now, to get ahead of the cost increase? That’s a savings of 20%!

Paid subs do little other than pay for the service that I, in turn, pay for. They get you ~6 exclusive posts per year. They are nice. That is all. In every other regard, the newsletter remains free to whoever wants (most of) it.

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In any case, thank you all for reading. I’ve recently been doing a bit of thinking about what all this writing is for (since, as we look ahead to our cybernetic future, “the money” sure ain’t it).

Well, it’s for me, obviously. And for the few dozen of you who read it. We’re not a large cadre, all of us put together. I’d love to reach more people but am more so happy that it’s reached you.

Still: if you know someone who might enjoy it, it would be a magnificent Christmas present if you could convince them to subscribe.

Looking ahead to 2026

I’m going to be impossible about this: