All right, let’s talk about the movies I watched near the end of the year. I don’t think I have enough for a full dedicated entry on any of these.

Elf: This is an iconic Christmas movie that I’d never watched, because it seemed like it’d just be Will Ferrell mugging for the camera ostentatiously in a way I don’t really enjoy. But at this point, I felt like it was cultural illiteracy not to watch it, so I did, and… it’s pretty much what I thought it’d be. It’s not terrible or anything, but neither is it especially good.

Wake Up Dead Man: This was a movie I enjoyed a great deal, and which should probably get an entry of its own, but I don’t have much to say about it. It’s the third Knives Out movie; I think it’s the weakest of the three, but it’s still really good. But it’s definitely Another One Of Those, so there’s not much more to say about it. (Other than that, having watched two seasons of Poker Face, it also feels a lot like a super-sized episode of that show.)

MST3K: The Movie: It’s genuinely weird that I’d never seen this before now. I love MST3K. I’ve probably seen all the episodes, some of them repeatedly. I’ve gone to live shows, I’ve watched RiffTraxes. And yet: Never got around to seeing the movie, inexplicably. Well, now I have, and… it feels like an episode of the show, for better and worse. Mostly “better” to me, because I like the show, but I feel like if I’d seen it in a theatre, I would’ve been disappointed by how theatrical it wasn’t.

The Girl in Room 2A: After a bunch of Spanish “gialli,” it’s nice to be back in Italy, with a giallo that feels like a proper giallo. It’s stylish, it’s sexy, it’s murderous, it’s often completely inexplicable. The main disappointment is that some plot elements are super-obvious, but… enh, it’s not a fatal flaw. If you like giallo, well, here’s an almost prototypical example of the genre.

Four Roads: I wanted to get up to a hundred movies watched in 2025, but sitting there on December 31st, the only way it was going to be possible was by watching short films, and so I did. This is Alice Rohrwacher’s pandemic film, where she took a 16mm camera and a bunch of old film out into the neighborhood by her house and shot scenes of her neighbors and the landscape. She’s in Italy (and an accomplished director), so it’s all gorgeous, and now I’m jealous of wherever it is she lives.

Hey Sweet Pea: This is the other short film I watched to hit quota, and it’s rather weirder. It starts off with the writer/director lip-syncing to his mom’s voicemail (where the title comes from), and then includes segments where people (badly) read the script to The Neverending Story. Described like that, it sounds avant-garde, weird for the sake of weirdness; but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels light-hearted and fun, and like the two halves are in dialogue with each other. It’s not like great, but also it’s like eight minutes, and it’s worth eight minutes.