25 things in 2025

YOUR MEDIA DIET WRAPPED

Adding just one more list to the constant end-of-year-assault of Best Ofs and Wrapped stories. Here are 25 things that I barely remembered. Note the slow decent into chaos. See you in 2026.

1. Pluribus. The core premise of Pluribus (2025, Apple TV+), a deeply depressed lesbian held hostage by acute toxic positivity, is like, my spiritual practice.

2. Running a marathon. In case I haven’t mentioned it (lol don’t mind me), I ran a whole marathon bitch. I spent the summer turning the world’s cheapest sport into a shopping spree. Gels, shoes, glasses, nothing that mattered so long as I could spend more money to forget the pain in my shins. Plus running literature: Born to Run (Christopher McDougall, 2009), Eat & Run (Scott Jurek, 2012), and Endurance (Alex Hutchinson). Shoutout to Runna.

somewhere between Running Industrial Complex and Armed Robbery

3. Train Dreams (2025, dir. Clint Bentley). I watched this on a treadmill because I’m a certified dumb cow who doesn’t know how to pick her movies. Even on the tiniest monitor available to mankind, Train Dreams was special and graceful.

4. Headache, Thank You For Almost Everything, full of zinging one-liners oscillating between profundity and gibberish. Brain rot for people with liberal arts degrees. See also: Real Lies’ We Will Annihilate Our Enemies.

5. Yearly returning TV shows. With The Pitt (Max) coming back in January, and Hacks (Max) and Slow Horses (AppleTV+) arriving like clockwork, gotta say it’s pretty cool not to wait a decade before a story is concluded.

6. Turnstile live in Berlin. It was magical. Less piss than at Oasis concerts or so I heard. I went right for the pit (I am not like the other girls) but I also spent €200 on merch, as is my right as a middle-aged woman with disposable income. What can I say, I am a patron of the arts.

Turnstile as recorded on my potato camera (see “Kodak Charmera”)

7. Black Bag (2025) was so underrated dog. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as spies who mostly talk and have a healthy relationship and I know it sounds drab but I think of it as erotica for people who love paperwork (i.e. virgos).

8. Kodak Charmera Guest of honor at every dinner party I bring her to. I put this digicam on the table and all the geriatric Millennials start hyperventilating. “It’s so tiny,” they shriek. The pictures are like shot on Apple Potato but they have “character”, and who among us doesn’t sometimes require an ice breaker at the function?

9. Andor Season 2 (2025, Disney+) is a miracle, a spy thriller so intelligent it feels like a clerical error on the Disney+ slate. In this year of our lord Andor is definitely the best Star Wars property, but also one of the best television experiences of all time.

10. Ruin My Life core¹. Sirât (2025, dir. Óliver Laxe) and Bring Them Down (2025, dir. Christopher Andrews) fucked me up big big time. While Bring Them Down is a muddy, 100-minute panic attack about Irish shepherding, Sirât, Cannes winner and Oscar contender, is either a masterpiece or colonialist torture porn, depending on which subreddit you read. I remain confounded by both, but we’re balls deep in slopville, so I respect any film that makes me feel so much.

11. Best Of The Century lists. Gotta love a good list. Bill Simmons’ 50 Most Rewatchable Movies and Dissect’s 21st Century Music Draft are fun hang podcasts².

12. Maurice, who is turning six but still setting unrealistic beauty standards for other guinea pigs

Maurice (no filter)

13. Movies by women, about women. I’m sure there were more this year but feminism is not my strong suit. I’m just a pretty face. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025, dir. Mary Bronstein), Sorry, Baby (2025, dir. Eva Victor), Die, My Love (2025, dir. Lynne Ramsay), and Materialists (2025, dir. Celine Song). More and more it seems to me that having a child is like getting repeatedly hit by falling cars that you must also love, so I continue to say no thank you to that particular experience.

14. Music that was created in a lab, by real scientists, for me (selection):

    1. Crushed, No Scope (90s baby pop);

    2. Lotto, They Are Gutting a Body of Water (zoomer shoegaze)

    3. Sleep Token, Even in Arcadia (horny metal)

    4. Turnstile, Never Enough (for men with a great skincare routine)

    5. Hayley Williams, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party (Jagged Little Pill for sober people)

15. The Mastermind (2025, dir. Kelly Reichardt). From the category Are they hot or are they tall? Loser man energy channeled into the least stressful heist movie ever. I love that it’s called The Mastermind, a film where a man is really giving it his best thinking to come up with a really, really bad idea³.

17. Best Songs of 2025. My Spotify playlist is public. If I hear Chappelle Roan or CMAT one more time I’ll walk right into traffic.

18. One of Them Days (2025, dir. Lawrence Lamont) WE NEED MORE COMEDIES

19. Faux-Prestige TV. If it looks good but relies on unnecessary sex or dumb female characters, it’s probably my jam. From The Hunting Wives (2025, Starz) to Taylor Sheridan’s Landman (2025, Paramount+) and Friends & Neighbors on AppleTV+, we are just vibing with unbelievably charismatic people in completely unbelievable situations. All of these shows are really bad to varying degrees, but that makes them all the more enjoyable. See also: The Diplomat (Netflix).

20. The Shrouds (2024, dir. David Cronenberg).

21. The dopamine hit of F1. Life is just an endless meeting in which we’re method acting as adults, presenting each other bullshit ideas until someone says yes, so after an exhausting day of fighting Excel or the dishwasher or the calorie tracker, mommy sometimes needs an audio-visual lobotomy in IMAX and a gallon of popcorn to survive what life throws in her way.

Saving cinema (alone)

21. WhatsApp Group Chats as historical bibliography of modern life. I accidentally deleted my entire message history while migrating to a third-party app (Beeper, highly recommended). I am fine. (I am not fine.) All that remains are the empty shells of old groups, usually just the names of the chats. Now the specters of a former life linger at the bottom of the app, including the family group chat we used to share with my mom. My mom has passed away. The chat has been empty since 2015. My brothers have long since changed their numbers. It sits there, idle and haunting. Then there is stuff like “30th Birthday Planning.” “London Brunch 2019.” A graveyard of social networks and people I no longer speak to. Scrolling through the ruins reveals a shift: group chat culture has contracted. Groups are smaller, tighter, often admin-only. The era of the 300-person mega-chat is gone. We are no longer dragging each other into the noise of other people’s memes and stickers, and thank God, but it’s sad to see how things end without being able to put an exact moment to it.

23. Fontaines D.C. (Summer 2025, Berlin) concert. Shout out to the tall men who let us push in front of them so we could actually see.

In this house we do not ask women how much they spent on concert merch, also I gave that cap to someone who recognized it was a line from Anatomy of a Fall, and that really warmed my heart but also now I need make this cap again

24. Parasocial Relationships. I have worked in social media for over a decade, yet I’ve never followed an influencer⁴ until now. Kim Gottwald⁵, a 22-year-old German ultra runner who won multiple Backyard Ultras in dramatic fashion and Yasi Salek, who’s a professional teenager, which is what I also aspire to become. I suppose I do contain multitudes.

25. More data. I ready 20 books this year. I ran 164 times for a total of 1668 kilometers. I watched 215 movies for 411 hours. I listened to 595 hours of podcasts. I listened to 32.103 minutes of music. I spent less 2000€ less on restaurants.

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Closing thoughts:

• For someone who watches a lot of movies, 2025 was a good movie year

• It was a very bad year for seeing movies in (German) cinemas. Most titles didn’t screen until months later, for a very limited window.

• The top 5 highest-grossing movies of 2025 were: Ne Zha 2, Zootopia 2, Avatar: Fire and Ash (obviously), Jurassic World Rebirth, and A Minecraft Movie.

• Everyone who currently isn’t paying for the premium or hasn’t paid me in other ways will be locked out from Plex in January automatically. Just the yearly cleanup. So best to subscribe:

1. Also in this category: Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky), another great feel bad movie of our time.

2. Worst Song of the Century contenders: Pharrell “Happy” and anything by Benson Boone, and please remember in a decade that I was the first to call Rosalia’s “Berghain” a mass delusion.

3. Conceptually reminded me of the performative competence in David Fincher‘s The Killer, where you spend the whole time exasperated with a hot man’s tragic life choices.

4. As in: to be consciously, willingly invested and influenced by their lives.

5. Even though I am constantly offended by his “mindset” hustler rhetoric - the David Goggins cosplay that suggests success requires destroying your body and ignoring anything related to wellbeing or community - but of course I smoke that shit like a crack pipe.