I am not as obsessive about watching movies as I am about books and other performance types. However, I needed to take some down time late this year, after somehow breaking two teeth on a Friday evening and needing to wait until Monday for repairs. So I pulled up the BFI movie list for 2025 and watched movies.

In the last month of the year, including that weekend, I saw:

• Hamnet
• Cover-up
• Cruella
• (half of) Afternoons of Solitude (the blood got to be too much for me)
• The Mastermind
• The History of Sound
• If I Had Leg’s I’d Kick You
• Muppet’s Christmas Carol
• The Shrouds
• Black Bag
• A House of Dynamite
• Resurrection
• Orwell 2+2 = 5
• G.I. Jane
• Little Women
• Summertime
• Sabrina
• Charade
• Wake Up Dead Man
• Tick, Tick…Boom!

They were all good, in different ways. I had read and really enjoyed Hamnet so was leery of a film version, and though while different, I thought the movie was very well done. I my very short list of adaptations I like enough to recommend.

I probably saw more movies in December than in the rest of the year combined. I have been pondering a year of no reading books, to see what it does to my mind, though I don’t think that replacing books with movies is the expected outcome. I was hoping to spend more time in consideration and contemplation, more conversations, and possibly more writing. (Though after this PhD thesis, it may be a while before I want to write again. We shall see.)