🍿 Perfect Days (2023) was the perfect movie, with a story that could not have been told through any other medium. In that way it was the polar opposite to that year’s Oscar winner for Best International Film, and I am certain it will be remembered longer and more fondly than The Zone of Interest.

🍿 A House of Dynamite (2025) was the horror movie of the year — nay, decade — with a soundtrack made for nightmares. It is also the most geographically correct DC movie in ages, although in 10 years living here I am yet to see someone wearing a clean suit take a WMATA bus to work. Regardless, it was heartening to see that even Netflix could produce an occasional diamond.

The British crime drama Broadchurch came out in 2013. John Favreau’s food porn vanity project Chef was released in 2014. Despite both now being more than a decade old, in my mind they are still filed under “new things that came out that we missed because we had an infant in the house while also being medical residents”. It was therefore jarring to see how dated they both were, and for similar reasons.

Broadchurch deals with the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a small coastal community. Twitter is mentioned a handful of times, only in the context of breaking news. There is no Instagram or messaging apps: pre-teens email each other. The boy’s family is at a loss for how to attract national attention to the killing and finds the answer in a tabloid journalist. It all feels quaint, though admittedly I don’t know if that was intentional even in 2013 (from the edgy music and the oh-so serious tone of the show, I suspect not). I won’t mention a recent British show by name for fear of spoiling other, but if you’ve seen both you will now what is the clear parallel and how much things have changed.

Chef, on the other hand, is completely Twitter-dependent, and is arguably one of the first movies to use Twitter #MainCharacter dynamics as a plot point (Justine Sacco had landed a few months before the movie was released, and probably wasn’t even on Favreau’s radar). Twitter is shown in a completely positive light, and I can’t think of any other movie that has done that. It is also a good time capsule of the food trucks on Twitter craze. The early 2010s were the peak time for both, before culture wars killed one and covid the other.

So now I am inclined to see what else came out in that 2010–2015 period. Is it too early to be nostalgic for those times?

🍿 Chef (2014) brought me back to my residency days in a Baltimore ICU, when the attending mentioned during rounds that he saw the movie with his grandson and enjoyed the scenes of food being cooked, if not the humor. A movie made for Netflix before Netflix made movies.

🍿 One Battle After Another (2025) was, I imagine, the best movie I will have seen this year. I went into the theater not knowing anything about it except that it is a PTA movie starring DiCaprio, and for the first few minutes I had to orient myself on whether it was set in the present day or the 1970s — initially because of the subject matter, but mostly because of the (beautiful, unforgettable) cinematography that resulted in more than one iconic scene. Should I remind you that I see the late 1960s/early 70s as the pinnacle of American movie-making? This is as firm a recommendation as you will get from me to go see a movie.

🍿 Weapons (2025) brought me back hope that Americans still know how to make movies. It is a simple story well told, which trusts the audience to make the appropriate inferences — important for a competent horror — and has an overarching point to make on the bias towards normalcy. Will re-watch!

🍿 Civil War (2024) was not a story about the United States, current events or politics, but rather about war correspondents and their not-at-all-healthy relationship with work. It could have been set anywhere; for added emotional hit — and to highlight the absolute pointlessness of the job — it takes place in and around the stretch of land from New York City to Washington DC.

Journalism is the focus, but of course the inhumanity of man towards man also shines through. Murders are plentiful and senseless. You are never sure who is on which side in any particular set piece, and if indeed there are any sides. The only thing anyone is sure about is that the dictator is circling the drain and that his fall is a matter of days.

This is where the movie can’t escape its Americanness. Couldn’t the same story have been told about something even more petty? Don’t many real-life war correspondents go through worse ordeals for smaller stories? At the end of the day — and take of this what you will — my war-torn Balkan heart found the movie too optimistic, though it tried to put on a veneer of cynicism. For true bleakness, try Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (1996) (eng. Pretty Village, Pretty Flame), a nihilist masterpiece that an inattentive viewer may confuse for a dark comedy.

🍿 The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (2024) was not as focused as I would have liked. It had a dash about board game designers, a splash of podcasters and YouTubers in the space, a good dose of the tabletop world championship, some pieces on players' ever-expanding personal collections, and so on, and so forth. All important, all shot in the modern, pleasing documentary style. Of course, when equal space is given to everything the message can only be “board games good”. Fine, but not exactly masterwork cinema.

🍿 May God Save Us (2016) was incredibly hard to watch, with the worst of human nature on full display and no positive characters whatsoever. Maybe you have to be more exposed to Catholicism to appreciate it?

🍿 The Body (2012) was the perfect puzzle-box thriller in which the myriad of small details that tickled your brain for not being quite right or made sense throughout the movie finally click in place minutes before the end and before you know it you want to watch it again. Which I will!