2025 end of year roundup

Film

This year I watched 224 films, of which:

• 164 were feature films (> 1 hour long), 60 were shorts
• 100 were 2025 releases
• 5 were films I'd seen before

My most visited cinemas were Showcase Avonmeads (33 visits), Cube (30 visits), watershed (19 visits).

Eligibility criteria: I've limited myself here to films that got a UK theatrical or streaming release in 2025.

• Black Bag
• Bugonia
• Caught Stealing
• Cloud
• Fiume o morte!
• Friendship
• Good One
• I'm Still Here
• Marty Supreme
• Nickel Boys
• One Battle After Another
• Pillion
• Sinners
• Sorry, Baby
• The Mastermind

The best 2025 short films I saw were My Info War and Daddy Superior.

There are still quite a few 2025 films I want to see so I might update this list retroactively.

TV

There's lots I haven't watched this year - I might come back to this bit. In poraticular I haven't watched Pluribus and need to catch up on The Last of Us and The Bear.

Eligibility criteria: here I've only included programmes which had at least 1 new episode in 2025.

• Big Boys
• Dept. Q
• Severance
• Such Brave Girls
• Taskmaster
• The Celebrity Traitors
• The Rehearsal
• The White Lotus

Music

Lots of good music came out this year, and I also went to some enjoyable gigs including Lorde, Autechre, Clipping, A.G. Cook and Jessica Winter).

I also made some music this year - I haven't done much recently, but I did A.G. Cooks's School of Song course in October an that pushed me to get back into it a bit, and that's something I want to carry forward into 2026.

Eligibility criteria: albums or EPs listed as 2025 releases on Spotify or Bandcamp. I'm not including reissues, compilations, or rerecords (so doesn't qualify).

• Baby - Dijon
• Blurrr - Joanne Robertson
• choke enough - oklou
• Dead Channel Sky - clipping.
• digi-squires - Nate Mercereau and Sam Gendel
• Essex Honey - Blood Orange
• hexed! - aya
• I Love My Computer - Ninajirachi
• Lux - Rosalia
• My First Album - Jessica Winter
• Now You See Me, Now You Don't - Marina Zispin
• SickElixir - Blawan
• Stardust - Danny Brown
• Thank You for Almost Everything - Headache
• Virgin - Lorde

Books

Last year I said:

I think next year I might try and tackle some of the bigger books on the shelf to free up some space [...] so I expect the count to drop in 2025.

I did actually do this, with some shorter books in between to stop it being too much of a slog. As a result, I only read 15 books this year. I've found it challenging but rewarding overall, so I'm going to continue the doorstop reading approach in 2026 - I'm currently half way through Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and really enjoying it.

Eligibility criteria: the best books of any age which I read for the first time in 2025.

• Harlequin Butterfly - Toh Enjoe
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler - Italo Calvino
• Our Share of Night - Mariana Enriquez
• The Books of Jacob - Olga Tokarczuk
• The Hotel - Daisy Johnson
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder - David Grann
• Wolf Hall / Bring Up the Bodies / The Mirror & The Light - Hilary Mantel

Games

Video

• Civilisation VI
• Suzerain
• A Highland Song
• Strange Antiquities

Board

• Bank Robbery
• Flip 7
• The Gig

Sport

I did more running this year - 608km total, the most I've done since 2022. I'm still slower than I used to be, but it's good to be back into it, and I've signed up for next year's Great Bristol Run.

I didn't do as much bike riding as I'd like - I'll try to do more next year.