Zvi’s 2025 In Movies

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.

Last year: Zvi’s 2024 In Movies.

You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there.

Letterboxd ratings go from 0.5-5. The scale is trying to measure several things at once.

5: Masterpiece. All-time great film. Will rewatch multiple times. See this film.

4.5: Excellent. Life is meaningfully enriched. Want to rewatch. Probably see this film.

4: Great. Cut above. Very happy I saw. Happy to rewatch. If interested, see this film.

3.5: Very Good. Actively happy I saw. Added value to my life. A worthwhile time.

3: Good. Happy that I saw it, but wouldn’t be a serious mistake to miss it.

2.5: Okay. Watching this was a small mistake.

2: Bad. I immediately regret this decision. Kind of a waste.

1.5: Very bad. If you caused this to exist, you should feel bad. But something’s here.

1: Atrocious. Total failure. Morbid curiosity is the only reason to finish this.

0.5: Crime Against Cinema. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

The ratings are intended as a bell curve. It’s close, but not quite there due to selection of rewatches and attempting to not see the films that are bad:

Trying to boil ratings down to one number destroys a lot of information.

Given how much my ratings this year conflict with critics opinions, I asked why this was, and I think I mostly have an explanation now.

There are several related but largely distinct components. I think the basic five are:

1. Quality with a capital Q and whether the movie has ambition and originality.

2. Whether the overall pacing, arc and plot of the movie holds your interest.

3. What message the movie sends and whether its arc comes together satisfyingly.

4. What does the movie make you feel? All the feels? None? Some of them?

5. Whether the movie is a good fit for you personally.

Traditional critic movie ratings tend, from my perspective, to overweight #1, exhibit predictable strong biases in #3 and #5, and not care enough about #2. They also seem to cut older movies, especially those pre-1980 or so, quite a lot of unearned slack.

Scott Sumner picks films with excellent Quality, but cares little for so many other things that once he picks a movie to watch our ratings don’t even seem to correlate. We have remarkably opposite tastes. Him giving a 3.7 to The Phoenician Scheme is the perfect example of this. Do I see why he might do that? Yes. But a scale that does that doesn’t tell me much I can use.

Order within a ranking is meaningful.

Any reasonable algorithm is going to be very good at differentially finding the best movies to see, both for you and in general. As you see more movies, you deplete the pool of both existing and new movies. That’s in addition to issues of duplication.

In 2024, I watched 36 new movies. In 2025, I watched 51 new movies. That’s enough of an expansion that you’d expect substantially decreasing returns. If anything, things held up rather well. My average rating only declined from 3.1 to 3.01 (if you exclude one kids movie I was ‘forced’ to watch) despite my disliking many of the year’s most loved films.

My guess is I could have gotten up to at least 75 before I ran out of reasonable options.

See The Naked Gun unless you hate fun. If you hated the original Naked Gun, or Airplane, that counts as hating fun. But otherwise, yes, I understand that this is not the highest Quality movie of the year, but this is worthy, see it.

You should almost certainly see Bogunia and Companion.

See Thunderboltsunless you are automatically out on all Marvel movies ever.

See A Big, Bold Beautiful Journey unless you hate whimsical romantic comedies or are a stickler for traditional movie reviews.

See Sorry, Baby and Hamnet, and then Sentimental Value, if you are willing to spend that time being sad.

See Novocaine and then maybe The Running Man if you want to spend that time watching action, having fun and being happy instead.

See Relay if you want a quiet thriller.

See Oh, Hi!, Splitsville and Materialists if you want to look into some modern dating dynamics in various ways, in that order or priority.

See Wick is Pain if and only if you loved the John Wick movies.

The world would be better if everyone saw A House of Dynamite.

I anticipate that Marty Supreme belongs on this list, it counts as ‘I’m in,’ but due to holidays and the flu I haven’t been able to go out and see it yet. The over/under is at Challengers.

This helps you understand my biases, and helps me remember them as well.

1. If the movie stinks, just don’t go. You know if the movie stinks.

2. Trust your instincts and your gut feelings more than you think you should.

3. Maybe gut feelings are self-fulfilling prophecies? Doesn’t matter. They still count.

4. You love fun, meta, self-aware movies of all kinds. Trust this instinct.

5. You do not actually like action movies that play it straight. Stop watching them. However, action movies that do something cool or unique can be very cool.

6. If the movie sounds like work or pain, it probably is, act accordingly.

7. If the movie sounds very indy or liberal, the critics will overrate it.

8. A movie being considered for awards is not a positive signal once you control for the Metacritic and Letterboxd ratings. If anything it is a negative.

9. Letterboxd ratings adjusted for context beat Metacritic. Rotten Tomatoes is the best test for ‘will the movie stink’. No review source has much predictive value beyond knowing if the movie stinks, if you fail to control for context.

10. Opinions of individuals very much have Alpha if you have enough context.

That leaves six remarkably well reviewed movies, all of which are indeed very high on Quality, where I disagreed with the consensus, and had my rating at 3 or less. In order of Quality as I would rank them, they are: One Battle After Another, Sinners, Black Bag, Train Dreams, Weapons and Frankenstein.

A strategy I think would work well for all six of those, at the risk of some spoilage, is to watch the trailer. If you respond to that trailer with ‘I’m in’ then be in. If not, not.

The predictive power of critical reviews, at least for me, took a nosedive in 2025. One reason is that the ratings clearly got more generous in general. Average Metacritic, despite my watching more movies, went from 61 → 66, Letterboxd went 3.04 → 3.33. Those are huge jumps given the scales.

In 2024, Letterboxd or Metacritic ratings were 48% and 46% correlated with my final ratings, respectively. This year that declined to 33% and 38%, and I discovered the best was actually Rotten Tomatoes at 44%, with IMDB at 42%.

If you consider only movies where I gave a rating of 2.5 or more, filtering out what I felt were actively bad movies, the correlation dropped to 1% and 6%, or 3% for IMDB, or -4% (!) for Rotten Tomatoes. Essentially all of the value of critics was in identifying which things sucked, and from my perspective the rest was noise.

Rotten Tomatoes is a one trick pony. It warns you about things that might suck.

Even more than before, you have to adjust critic ratings for whether critics will overrate or underrate a movie of this type and with this subject matter. You can often have a strong sense of why the critics would put up a given number, without having to read reviews and thus risk spoilers.

Using multiple sources, and looking at their relative scores, helps with this as well. A relatively high IMDB score, even more than Letterboxd, tells you that the audience and the movie are well-matched. That can be good news, or that can be bad news.

Last year there were movies where I disagreed with the review consensus, but I always understood why in both directions. I might think Megalopolis is Coppola’s masterpiece despite its problems, but don’t get me wrong, I see the problems.

This year I mostly get why they liked the ‘overrated six’ above, but there are several cases where I do not know what they were thinking, and I think the critical consensus is objectively wrong even by its own standards.

I haven’t found a solution to the problem of ‘how do you check reviews without spoiling the movie?’ given that the average score itself can be a spoiler, but also I notice I haven’t tried that hard. With advances in LLMs and also vibe coding, I clearly should try again.

The power of ‘I’m in’ peaked in 2024.

The rule for ‘I’m in’ is:

1. You must be excited and think to yourself, ‘You son of a bitch, I’m in.’

2. Sources of this can include trailers, posters, talent and other info.

3. However this cannot be on the basis of reviews.

That year, there were 6 movies where in advance I said ‘I’m in,’ and they were 6 of my top 9 movies for the year.

This year the power of ‘I’m in’ was still strong, but less reliable. I’d count 10 such movies this year, including 4 of my ultimate top 5, but the other 6 did not break into the 4+ range, and there was a 3 and a 2.5. That’s still a great deal, especially given how many movies where it seemed like one ‘should’ be excited, I noticed I wasn’t, and that proved correct, including One Battle After Another, Black Bag, Weapons and Sinners.

I wonder: How much of the power of ‘I’m in’ is the attitude and thus is causal, versus it being a prediction? I have low confidence in this.

I control for this effect when giving ratings, but the experience is much better in a theater, maybe good for an experiential boost of ~0.3 points on the 0.5-5 point scale. That’s big. I have to consciously correct for it when rating movies I watch at home.

I highly recommend getting a membership that makes marginal cost $0, such as the AMC A-List or the similar deal at Regal Cinemas. This helps you enjoy the movie and decide to see them more.

Unlike last year, there were remarkably many movies that are in green on Metacritic, but that I rated 2.5 or lower, and also a few of the 3s require explanation as per above.

I don’t know how this happened, but an active majority of the movies I rated below 3 had a Metacritic score above 60. That’s bizarre.

Minor spoilers throughout, I do my best to limit it to minor ones, I’ll do the 3s sorted by Metacritic, then the others sorted by Metacritic.

1. One Battle After Another (Metacritic: 95, Zvi: 3) is probably going to win Best Picture. It’s not hard to see why. This was the highest Quality movie I’ve seen this year, and yet I did not enjoy watching it. The jokes mostly fell flat and aside from the daughter and the Dojo sensei I couldn’t emphasize with or root for the characters. Why? Fundamentally, because the movie depends on the idea that Bob is a Good Dude, and that the revolutionaries are sympathetic. Sorry, no dice, and no amount of stacking the deck with other awfulness is going to change that. There’s also a superposition between ‘this deck is stacked and the world presented is very different from ours’ and ‘actually this is our world and this is a call to action and that is what life is about, do you know what time it is?’ I grudgingly have to give this 3 stars anyway, because Quality is so high.

2. Train Dreams (Metacritic 88, Zvi: 3): This is the easiest one to explain. It’s an arthouse movie where very little happens, that thinks it is being profound, and it really is not being profound.

3. Black Bag (Metacritic 85, Zvi: 3): Here I’m actually confused where the 85 is coming from as opposed to a 65-75. I mean yes this is well done all around but there’s a reason it isn’t in the Oscar race, none of it is new or special and I didn’t feel it said anything, and it mostly left me cold.

4. Sinners (Metacritic: 84, Zvi: 3): This oozes cool and I want to love it, I get why so many others love it, but for me the vampires simply don’t work. I know what it’s trying to do there, but it’s hitting us over the head with it and everything involving the vampires felt like it was going through the motions and it would have been so much better, as Matthew Yglesias suggests, to do this as about racism straight up without also using the metaphor.

Now the ones I actively disliked:

5. Weapons (Metacritic: 81, Zvi: 2.5): The first half of this would be great if you had stuck the landing, Amy Madigan is terrific, but it didn’t come together in the end, the plot holes are absurd and the central conceit feels unjustified in light of that. I felt like I had whiplash going from a well-observed, highly detailed and realistic meditation on grief and confusion and blame and how we deal with that, into something else entirely. I could be more forgiving, but it turns out I am not.

6. Frankenstein (Metacritic: 78, Zvi: 2.5). I hated the message this version is trying to send, this is techno pessimistic and against knowledge and striving on a deep level, and frankly it was overly long and boring. Less about AI than you think.

7. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Metacritic: 73, Zvi: 2.5). The critics are wrong. This is just bad. I went in expecting lousy, I was mildly disappointed by the level of lousy, and then I saw 73 and was confused. You Had One Job. You were supposed to Do The Thing. Then you didn’t do the thing, either in terms of justifying the romantic connection or actually engaging properly with Jane Austen. ‘Cmon now.

8. Superman (Metacritic: 68, Zvi: 2.5): I had a lot of thoughts on this one. I found it both full of plot holes, and I hated that they back away from asking any of the movie’s potentially interesting questions. But I can see finding this cool if you care about very different things than this, and the new DC universe could ultimately be a huge upgrade.

9. F1 (Metacritic: 68, Zvi: 2): I’d say the critics are wrong but the people had a good time. Then again, the people don’t know racing. I used to be an actual F1 fan, so let me say both that this is not how any of this works, this has nothing to do with Formula 1, and otherwise this was completely paint by numbers.

10. Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (Metacritic: 67, Zvi: 2.5): This was my biggest disappointment of the year. I was in! Dead Reckoning was historic due to its influence on Joe Biden and also a rip roaring good time that was remarkably smart about AI. Then this was none of those things. It squandered all the interesting setup, was far dumber about AI to the point of idiot plot and frankly the action scenes were not cool. What a disaster.

11. Wicked: For Good (Metacritic: 67, Zvi: 1.5): My review was ‘Hard write, harder watch.’ Seriously, everyone involved tried so damn hard, yet there’s so little joy to be found here as they try to dutifully line things up. Everything feels forced. There’s barely any cool dancing and the songs are bad. Okay, yes, fine, the Costume Design is Oscar-level, but that does not a movie make.

12. The Smashing Machine (Metacritic: 65, Zvi: 2.5): Emily Blunt deserves better, in all senses. Ultimately the movie is boring.

13. Fantastic Four: First Steps (Metacritic: 65, Zvi: 2): All the fun happens off screen. Michael Flores defended this as a great ‘Fantastic Four movie’ on the theory that it captured their world and the Fantastic Four are boring. Weird flex.

There are four movies requiring explanation on the upside, where they were below 60 on Metacritic yet I actively liked them.

All four seem like clear cases of ‘yes I know that technically this is lacking in some important way but the movie is fun, damn it, how can you not see this?’

1. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (Metacritic: 41, Zvi: 4.5): I understand the complaint that the movie has ‘unearned emotion’ and the script doesn’t lay the proper foundations for what it is doing. I don’t care. This otherwise has Quality behind only One Battle After Another and Bogunia. All you have to do is say ‘I’m in!’ and decide not to be the ‘stop having fun guys’ person who points out that technically all this emotion you could be feeling hasn’t been earned. Accept that some of the ‘work’ isn’t being fully done and do it your damn self. Why not do that?

2. Novocaine (Metacritic: 58, Zvi: 4): A borderline case where again I think people need to remember how to have fun. This was a joy throughout, you can enjoy a good popcorn movie with a great premise and just go with it.

3. The Running Man (Metacritic: 55, Zvi: 3.5): I thought this actually executed on its premise really well, and did a bunch of smart things both on the surface level and also under the hood. It won’t change your life but it gets it, you know?

4. Honey, Don’t! (Metacritic: 45, Zvi: 3.5): Yeah, okay, it’s deeply silly and in some important senses there’s nothing there, but it’s sexy and fun, why not live a little.

You can say the same thing about The Naked Gun. It has a 75, perfectly respectable, but its joke hit rate per minute is absurd, it is worth so much more than that.

I once again used consideration for awards as one selection criteria for picking movies. This helped me ‘stay in the conversation’ with others at various points, and understand the state of the game. But once again it doesn’t seem to have provided more value than relying on Metacritic and Letterboxd ratings, especially if you also used IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

Last year I was very happy with Anora ending up on top. This year I’m not going to be happy unless something very surprising happens. But I do understand. In my word, given the rules of the game, I’d have Bogunia sweep the major awards.

I’m very happy with this side hobby, and I expect to see over one new movie a week again in 2026. It was a disappointing year in some ways, but looking back I still got a ton of value, and my marginal theater experience was still strongly positive. I think it’s also excellent training data, and a great way to enforce a break from everything.

It would be cool to find more good people to follow on Letterboxd, so if you think we’d mesh there, tag yourself for that in the comments.