Corryvreckan

I Know Where I'm Going (1945) - Powell, Pressburger Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) always knew what she wanted and where she was going from an early age. At age 25, she is engaged to Bellinger, an industrialist twice her age. He has summoned her to an island of Kiloran, off the North West coast of Scotland where he rented a castle for their marriage ceremony. Joan eagerly packs her bags and wedding dress, says goodbye to her worried father and heads north. According to the itinerary that was sent to her, she will take an overnight train to Glasgow, then to the port town of Tobermory then a boat to Kiloran. But when she gets to Tobermory, the weather turns bad and she is marooned for days. With the help of Torquil McNeil (Roger Livesey), a local Kiloran man who is on a brief leave from military duty, Joan secures lodging. There, she finds locals gossiping about her future husband who is throwing money around while not knowing the local way of living, which is very much tied to its nature and the sea.

At first, Joan keeps to herself out of politeness, not showing her frustration at her delay due to strong gale wind that prevents her from a short boat ride to Bellinger on Kiloran, but as each day goes by, she grows ever more impatient and bitchy to everyone around her, while the local ferry man keeps giving her vague answers about the weather and possibilities of crossing the water. Meanwhile, McNeil, whose family owns the castle that Bellinger is renting from, is very much attracted to Joan, and Joan, faithful to her betrothed, keeps her distance.

Joan gets fed up with all the waiting, and buys her way on to a boat, manned by a local boy who desperately needs money to marry a local sweetheart, who happens to be the ferry man's daughter. Everyone warns about the dangers of boat flipping over and drowning but Joan, even if it's risking other people's lives, she is stubborn and selfish and won't change her mind. McNeil first tries to convince her, then joins her to help cross the water. Predictably, the weather turns bad, the boat takes on water and the engine dies. And the boat gets caught in corryvreckan- the whirlpool created by tumultuous sea and storm.

I Know Where I'm Going is another poignant tale from the Archers (Powell & Pressburger) that shows however determined and confident you are, life always throws curve balls at you. And money isn't everything. The dangerous boat rides sequences are spectacular and some great visual effects also. It showcases the legends and culture and scenic beauty of Scotland, if not a little unconvincing romance.

Top 20 Favorite Films of 2025

2025 was a tumultuous year. Reeling from the trauma and constant stress from the topsy-turvy world that we are currently living in, and with a new college teaching gig, I had very few films logged on this blog. And even after participating many of the film series and festivals throughout the year, nothing really stood out or spoke to me.

The theme this year was all about "anti"- anticonformist, antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, antiwhatever.... Some better at making their points than others. I had no clear favorite until I watched Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value early November, a real standout. And it never happened to me this late. But I managed to pull in 20 2025 favorites here:

*Caught by the Tides, Grand Tour, The Shrouds and Afternoons of Solitudes all ended up in my Top 2024 List.


1. Sentimental Value - Trier
As usual, it being a Joachim Trier film, Sentimental Value is not about one thing, but about a lot of things, so not just the house or any inanimate objects that we have feelings towards - parents, siblings, history, art, gnerational trauma, loneliness and most importantly, love. Something that AI can never reproduce or emulate, at least not yet. It is yet again, a beautifully written (co- written by Trier's long time writing partner Eskil Vogt), nuanced film that you come to expect from one of the most literary filmmakers of our time.

2. Sirât - Laxe
Sirât is part Madmax, part Sorcerer, part Antonioni, contemplating where Cormac McCarthy's The Road left off. It's not making a grand statement about the hopelessness of the state of the world. It shows how random death stalks, that grief is universal, that we can't ignore the suffering of others because, again, we are all in this together.

3. The Secret Agent - Mendonça Filho With Bolsonaro and the ultra rightwing factions of the Brazilian political spectrum being in charge not far from the collective memories, The Secret Agent is about rebuking anti-intellectualism by having university researchers both past and present the heroes of the film which is also very pertinent in our own political climate. Slow at revealing the plot and not spoon feeding the audience with all the information and backstory, the film beckons at your curiosity to find out more about the not too distant past of checkered Brazilian history.

4. Resurrection - Bi
Bi, with Kaili Blue and Long Days Journey into Night, cultivated cinema as a waking dream with languorous filmic language with implausibly long takes and dreamlike atmosphere. Resurrection, its ironic title notwithstanding, is an elegy to the cinema and its history. It is a staggering work of an artist with means (backed by CG Cinema and Arte France) to go big or go broke. While the premise being thin, Resurrection is a towering artistic achievement above the sea of mediocre offerings in the state of world cinema right now.

5. Frankenstein - Del Toro
The story of a madman's obsession destroying everything he loves and blaming it on his own creation, their unbreakable bondage and finally forgiveness really moved me in the end. Del Toro, chasing after his childhood dreams of remaking Universal Monster films, created something classy and beautiful here.

6. Die My Love - Ramsay Foreshadowing what's to come with Jennifer Lawrence roaming around the yard on all fours with a kitchen knife in her hand, Ramsay makes a point that the film is not about Grace suffering from depression, but how a young woman is perceived when she behaves outside societal norms.

7. Sinners - Coogler
Aside from being very uneven in tone and themes it tries to potray, Coogler's Sinners is a rousing popcorn flick and a crowd pleaser first and foremost. Coogler uses vampire genre to tell a tale of the cunniving, two faced white supremacy with their divide and conquer tactics. The movie relies on Michael B. Jordan's charisma to carry it through and he does it with grace.

8. One Battle After Another - Anderson
One Battle After Another is a fantasy, based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, which was published in 1990 in the throes of the Bush Sr. regime. If anything, it shows that nothing much has changed- the kidnapping and deportation of the undocumented and overarching racism of the country. I say fantasy because as much as I wish that there is a well connected and well equipped underground network of leftist resistance going on in the age of tiktok, but there isn't.

9. It Was Just an Accident - Fanahi
Panahi, in this slow-burn thriller, brings up the concept of morality and justice in Iran. And he reveals how the totalitarian regime inflicted upon political dissenters from all social strata, an unspeakable collective trauma. And he doesn't shy away from being bluntly critical about the totalitarian regime of his country, while showing ordinary people's humanity not being lost. It Was Just an Accident is a riveting and beautiful film.

10. Misericordia - Giuradie
Guiaudie's a master at absurdist humor that is still very much down to earth. Think Misericordia as stripped down, depoliticized, working class Teorema where one person seduces everyone around him willingly or unwillingly. Jérémie is not a Godot, or American Uncle or your ideal manifest in a human form. He is full flesh and blood with his own desires and people somehow love him back. The police is on his track because of his shaky alibi, but it's the local priest who gives him cover. Love works in stange ways. Misericordia is a delightful, absurdist comedy that says a lot about strange human desires and attractions.

11. Nouvelle Vague - Linklater
Breathless, a perennial French New Wave film that started everything and changed filmmaking forever, is closely reenacted and memorialized along with the movement and people involved. I got to admit, being a diehard Godard-head, I was very skeptical going into this film. But rest assured, Linklater, coming from the experimental indie filmmaking background, knows his history of cinema and understands how to pay homage without being nostalgic and sentimental about the New Wave and its influences that had on him as a filmmaker. And Linklater's assumption is right about his view on Breathless as a granddaddy of indie filmmaking.

12. No Other Choice - Park
No Other Choice touches upon a lot of modern society's illness with satirical humor- there's dying manufacturing industries, automation and A.I. taking over human labor, deforestation and autism. As usual, Park Chanwook is a first and foremost visual stylist. There's more visual ideas in No Other Choice than most Hollywood releases in a year combined.

13. Miroirs No. 3 - Petzold
The melodic piano composition of Miroirs No. 3 reflects the sound of the gentle waves. Whatever the circumstances of the people who are lost at sea in that scenario, the music is soothing and calm, reflecting on the comfort of a family. The white picket fence that Betty is painting also reflects the yearning for ideal family life. As the title suggests, everything is a reflection of what should have been. It's the idea of a perfect family that haunts Petzold's characters, even though they never had it in the first place. And it is this tragedy in the modern world that Petzold keeps stressing with his films: yearning for the ideal world that never has materialized under the capitalist system.

14. Universal Language - Rankin
Rankin and co, create a deadpan comedy that is not only an ode to Iranian cinema, but a unique cross-cultural netherworld that feels consciously dour and less hipsterly yet familiar. Universal Language is a truly unique comedy that will put a smile on your face.

15. 100,000,000,000,000 - Vernier
Taking place in glitzy Monaco near Christmas time, Virgil Vernier's new film focuses on Alfine, an escort who describes himself as having a nice ass, nice lips, nice cock but lacking initiative. A million, trillion, quadrillion- numbers so big they lose all meaning and don't contribute to anything to our lives. As usual, Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis), examines the seedy underbelly of our shallow modern society, urban isolation, loneliness, and human connection. Virgil Vernier remains to be one of the most interesting contemporary French directors working today.

16. The Sparrow in the Chimney - Zürcher
As with the Zurcher Bros' last two films, Strange Little Cat and The Girl with the Spider, The Sparrow presents Zürcher's unique visual style - a blocking to create a claustrophobic atmosphere where everyone's cramped in the kitchen corridors, squeaking by each other and going in and out of static frames, and in and out of windows. The Sparrow in the Chimney examines the familial trappings and yearning for freedom which might not be as ideal as it appears to be. Beautifully realized with sensuous visual details from inanimate objects to animals, the film cements the unique storytelling talents of the Zürchers.

17. Weapons - Cregger The success of the horror genre over the last decades have been steady, not only at the box office and cost/profit margins, but also in its quality. Even though movie studios still doll out sequels and franchises to grab quick bucks, there have been many good original horror films in recent years that's been giving audiences something new, instead of following the same old fomular with predictable plotlines. Weapons, the new movie from Zach Cregger (Barbarians), understands the art of conceal. The slow build up of a mysterious disappearance of a group of school children, causing anguish and flinging accusations among adults in a small Pennsilvanian town, blows up to frenzied revelations in chapters seen from different character's point of views of the same event. It's an effective way to get maximum surprises out of the many twists and turns of this horror comedy.

18. The Fence - Denis
From her debut film Chocolat, Beau Travail to White Material, Denis examined the colonization and its aftermath of the African continent by white Europeans. Entitlement, guilt, violence and eroticism were all there. Then she made films depicting the African diaspora experience in No Fear, No Die, I can't Sleep and 35 Shots of Rum with her trademark grace and sensuality. With The Fence, the political message here is much more blunt.

19. Ice Tower - Hadžihalilović
Ice Tower, just like her previous films, Hadžihalilović aptly suggests the frightening grownup world where things are not as bright and exciting as one hopes to be, but decidedly dour, sad, full of pain and filled with ugliness. Her explorations might be seen as only scratching its shiny surface. But it's usually the negative space behind the façade that looms over all of her films, keeping all the mysteries intact and bewitching us to come back time and time again to see her dark and hypnotic artistry.

20. Rabbit Trap - Chainey Moody and trippy, both cinematography (Dp, Andreas Johannessen) and sound design are terrific. Verging on magic realism, the moss and fungus invading the interior of the cottage as Davenports are put under the spell of the child is truly a wonder (thanks to production designer Lucie Red). Patel and McEwen are both fantastic as a couple who share an unspoken, probably some dark backstory, and have terrific chemistry together. But it's young Jade Croot who shines as a mysterious child who throws themselves in the lives of Davenport, and who might not be human at all. Croot's performance has the similar intensity as young Barry Keogan in Lanthimos's Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Curiosity

The Secret Agent (2025) - Mendonça Filho To filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, Recifé, the capital city of Brazil's northwest region where he grew up, is what Fenyang in Shanxi Province means to Jia Zhangke. Like Jia, Mendonça Filho, has been chronicling the changing times, in both real and fictional stories of his beloved region. After series of critically acclaimed films in and around Recifé, he comes up with The Secret Agent, a sun-lit neo-noir/political thriller taking place in 1977, which makes a great companion piece to Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his documentary about history and cinema in Recifé.

Mendonça Filho, using the meticulously recreated old Recifé as a backdrop for a story about a man on the run, trying to navigate the place where daily violence and corruption are rampant under the country's military dictatorship.

As Marcelo/Armando (Wagner Maura) arrives in a dusty, desolate gas station on the outskirts of the town, he finds a dead body lying on the ground, partially covered with rocks and cardboard boxes. The proprietor of the station is completely nonplussed by the bullet riddled body. Since all their resources are tied up for the carnival, which is just wrapping in town, cops won't come until Ash Wednesday, he says to Marcelo. But soon the cops arrive, not for the body, but to shake up Marcelo for bribery. From the beginning, the filmmaker lets us know that violence and death are everyday occurrences for the citizens of Recifé with corruption in law enforcement normalized.

Armando under alias, Marcelo, is welcomed by a propriator Donã Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) of a building complex doubling as a refugee hideout. It is slowly revealed that Armando was a university researcher who rubbed a powerful company head and now a high ranking government official, Ghirroti (hailing from Sao Paolo), the wrong way. They met in 1974 and had a blowout, due to Ghirroti's attitude towards what he deems as country hicks (Armando and his research team) and his extreme southern arrogance. Now Ghirroti wants to eliminate Armando and send two assassins (a disgraced ex-military and his stepson) from the south.

Fernando, Armando's adorable young son, has been raised by his grandfather Alexandre (who is based on the real life film projectionist who was featured in Pictures of Ghosts), but longs to live with his fugitive father. Armando is in Recifé not only to retrieve his son back but to find out about his mother's past since she was from the region. With the help of underground resistance network against military dictatorship, he gets assigned a job in an ID issuing government facility in town, which also happens to be in the same building as the police station, lead by corrupt cop, Euclides. Armando needs to juggle and pit the unsuspecting police and assassins against each other while he waits for the new passport to arrive.

Tall and bearded Wagner Maura is effortlessly sexy with his sad eyes in his fugitive ways. And the film's filled with memorable characters and faces. Udo Kier shows up in his last role as a reclusive German Jew partaking in the wild street carnival.

As with all other Mendonça Filho films, the geopolitics of Brazil, the class struggles, regional culture and personal memories all vividly intersect in The Secret Agent. The title gives Armando's story an air of hero's tale full of intrigue and curiosity. It also has a lot to do with the pulpy cinema tradition and telenovelas which the filmmaker was brought up in. There's an urban legend story brought to life in a man's leg discovered in a shark's stomach and police trying to cover it up. There's a sequence of a severed leg moving around and attacking unsuspecting people participating in cruising sessions in the public park at night. Also the significance of the American influence in pop culture is everywhere - Jaws was playing in theaters in 77 in Brazil, so was Omen and Chicago's If You Leave Me Now is on the radio all in the backdrop of seedy and dangerous Recifé in the 70s.

With Bolsonaro and the ultra rightwing factions of the Brazilian political spectrum being in charge not far from the collective memories, The Secret Agent is about rebuking anti-intellectualism by having university researchers both past and present the heroes of the film which is also very pertinent in our own political climate. Slow at revealing the plot and not spoon feeding the audience with all the information and backstory, the film beckons at your curiosity to find out more about the not too distant past of checkered Brazilian history. Definitely one of the year's best.

Suffocating Conformity

Die My Love (2025) - Ramsay Lynne Ramsay depicts a young woman experiencing the perils of motherhood at great length with the help of a feral performance by Jennifer Lawrence and intimate/expansive images by DP Seamus McGarvey, in their second collaboration after We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).

Short on backstories in typical Ramsay fashion, Die My Love is mostly told visually, from a young woman's perspective as she goes through a postpartum depression. Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are a young couple, moving into an old fixer-upper farm house in the countryside that belonged to Jackson's relative. The house is all covered in old wall papers and has rat problems. No matter, the young couple is enthusiastic to start a life together and Grace soon becomes pregnant with a son. Left alone to her own devices while her partner Jackson is away for a job in the city half of the time, Grace's daily life, bored and living in her own head, veers dangerously into fantasy territory.

Foreshadowing with Grace roaming around the yard on all fours with a kitchen knife in her hand, Ramsay makes a point that the film is not about Grace suffering from depression, but how a young woman is perceived when she behaves outside societal norms.

Grace does act irrational and compulsive - throwing herself through the glass window while arguing with Jackson, strips to her underwear and jumps into the kitty pool at a party, fantasizes about a married neighbor (LaKeith Stanfield). Family and friends are left helpless, not knowing how to help her. And the film shows how normal society deals with a 'difficult woman' - either marry her or institutionalize her. Jackson does both, but that doesn't fix Grace.

Filled with many details and nuances with McGarvey's 4:3 ratio shot images simultaneously confining and expansive, and great supporting cast- Pattinson as wide eyed, frustrated partner, the great Sissy Spacek as Jackson's sleepwalking, shotgun totting mom and the only person who understands Grace (reminiscent of her character in Badlands) and Nick Nolte as Jackson's dementia suffering dad, Die My Love is a great film about suffocating conformity of a life of a young woman. I really liked it.

The Hole

If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You (2025) - Bronstein Rose Byrne gives it all for If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, a prolonged postpartum depression story of a therapist mom juggling life with an unseen (but heard) daughter with a medical condition (pediatric feeding disorder) where she has a feeding tube in her belly, while her Navy captain husband is away for 2 months.

It starts out with the ceiling of Linda (Byrne)'s suburban house leaking water then collapsing, leaving a gaping big hole. She has no choice but to move into a shabby motel with her daughter while arguing with her husband and contractors over the phone. She blurts out all her feelings to her very unsympathetic therapist (Conan O'Brien) who has an office in the same building as hers. Linda has to deal with her daughter's medical issues and it brings out all the resentment and fear and pain of giving birth, and being a mother in general. More chaos ensues when Linda seeks the help of James (A$AP Rocky), a manager of the motel who takes sympathy on her situation. One of Linda's patient, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a young mother who is extremely paranoid about her toddler's safety, disappears during the session and leaves the baby behind, Linda's life get progressively more chaotic, resulting in her therapist to say that he can't see her anymore after she crosses the professional boundaries repeatedly.

It's all about the hole both physical and metaphysical- the hole in the ceiling, the hole in the daughter's belly, giving birth, the black hole and the unknown universe, the empty space in her life... Bronstein has a very good sense of humor and timing, the cast is spot on, especially Byrne who embodies the frazzled middle aged woman whose life is in turmoil and self doubt and blame plaguing her every minute. In an inspiring choice of casting for the therapist, Bronstein makes O'Brien play straight, going against his TV persona and the result is hysterical. Christian Slater shows up late as the blaming husband. Some cool visuals and hallucination sequences also. It's funny, but at the same time not, because it's so real and stressful all the same.