On this day of Thanksgiving, we here at The Contending would like to share our gratitude for 2025 film and television. Here are some of the words, the performances, and the moments in 2025 entertainment that we will always cherish and be eternally thankful for. At the top of all of our lists are you, our dear readers. We will always be thankful for the time you spend reading and engaging with our content. We hope you continue to follow us as we evolve in 2026!
Until then, here’s what we at The Contending are most thankful for in 2025 film and TV (mild spoilers ahead).
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Credit: Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Clarence Moye
Agnes Attends Her First Shakespeare Play in Hamnet
Technically, my moment slightly spoils the ending of Chloé Zhao’s upcoming Hamnet, although trailers heavily foreshadow / preview it. Plus, many across the internet praised the scene, but consider yourself warned. No moment in 2025 film affected me more than the emotional catharsis of Agnes (a transcendent Jessie Buckley) seeing Hamlet for the first time. We’ve come to understand that Agnes, while fiercely and naturally intelligent, isn’t well versed in broader culture. She prefers the sanctity and simplicity of the natural world — the forest, her bees, her pet kestrel, her healing herbs — as well as the presence of her close family. Whatever her husband (Paul Mescal) does in London exists, in her mind, as his own business.
When their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jube) dies unexpectedly, Agnes and her husband (the film and original Maggie O’Farrell novel rarely refer to him by name) deal with the tragedy in very different ways. The husband sequesters himself in art: expressing his anguish, his heartbreak, and his loss through writing. On the other side, the colors of Agnes’s verdant life drained away. The grief leaves behind the mundanity of a world that took her only son. Eventually, she discovers that her husband appears to have written a play, Hamlet, that may refer to their lost son. She travels to London’s Globe Theater with her brother (Joe Alwyn) to see the play herself. Through these few moments, Buckley brings her performance to a stunning crescendo. She appears initially horrified: her husband appears to have easily moved on while she remains mired in grief. By the end of the play, she understands what he’s done. The moment moves her beyond words. A simple gesture, an extended hand in sympathy, strikes the audience with a primal force.
The moment wrecked me emotionally, the first in the film to do so. Yet, I will be forever grateful that it exists. It gorgeously makes the connection between tragedy and art and healing. A perfect ending to Zhao’s masterpiece.
Courtesy of 20 Steps Production, Karlovy Vary Film Festival
Frank J. Avella
Three International Feature Endings (Familia, Panopticon, Sentimental Value)
Strangely, I am grateful for the hopeful endings I’ve seen this year, in many films, specifically two terrific, not-easy-to-see, coming-of-age International Feature Oscar submissions, Italy’s Familia and Georgia’s Panopticon, as well as one hopeful and sublime final scene from Norway’s Sentimental Value.
Without giving away what those endings are…
In both Francesco Costabile’s Familia and George Sikharulidze’s Panopticon, we follow two psychologically damaged teen boys (played by Francesco Gheghi and Data Chachua respectively) with horrible fathers, who find themselves turning to extreme right-wing groups to find some sense of belonging. Both mistreat women and are psychologically scarred by the religion they were born into. And both young men come to the brink of permanently ruining their lives. Yet, both films end optimistically (at least that was my read).
In Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, we follow the emotionally turbulent journeys of a successful stage actress (the luminous Renate Reinsve), her more stable sister (a captivating Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and their estranged, director father (wondrous Stellan Skarsgård). The film ends with an extraordinary sequence that that shows that art can sometimes forge a necessary bridge towards understanding, forgiveness and reconnection, in even the most messy and tumultuous relationships.
Jalal Haddad
Diving Into the Los Angeles Cinephile Community
2025 has been a challenging but resilient year for Los Angeles and one that has made me reflect on what I love most about this city. This year, in terms of pop culture, I’ve realized I’m most grateful for L.A.’s vibrant and thriving repertory film scene. We have one of the most expansive film communities in the world, and on any given day, day or night, I have access to countless Hollywood classics and international treasures. It doesn’t matter if any given new release disappoints, there will always be something playing that I can get excited about.
The L.A. cinephile community has brought me immense joy and offered a distraction and inspiration through some of the most challenging parts of my year.
Throughout 2025, I’ve had numerous new experiences at the movies that have blown me away. Through the American Cinematheque, I fell in love with Shinji Somai’s The Friends and Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Island Closest to Heaven. I was also blown away by my first experience with Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake is Missing. The historic Egyptian Theatre entertained with an expansive series of many Hitchcock classics of which I was able to visit and revisit: Rope, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, To Catch a Thief, and the original The Man Who Knew Too Much – all on 35mm.
Two of my favorite screenings this year at the Egyptian included two Oscar-nominated classics from the 70s that have been left out of the conversation in recent years: John Berry’s Claudine starring Diahann Carroll and Joann Micklin Silver’s Hester Street starring Carol Kane.
In honor of the passing of the city’s most authentic filmmaker, I caught screenings of many David Lynch classics including Eraserhead and Lost Highway.
At the Academy Museum, I spent Valentine’s Day at a sold out screening of Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. I was also introduced to international classics including Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante and Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana. I also loved revisiting a handful of Phillip Seymour Hoffman classics in a series the Academy Musuem hosted earlier this year celebrating the late actor.
This year, I didn’t have an opportunity to be at the New Beverly as often as I would have liked, but I did get to attend a George Sherman double feature. I’d also be remiss not to single out Vidiots in Eagle Rock.
When I look back on the year in film, these are the moments that I had the most fun with and will continue to look at most fondly as the year comes to an end.
Ben Morris
Yoo Man-su Contemplates Murder For the First Time No Other Choice
In No Other Choice, Yoo Man-su has been struggling since being let go from the paper company and seeing his family having to cut back and risk losing his home. So when he sees Choi Seon-chul, a successful paper company manager just standing outside alone, Yoo Man-su sneaks on top of a building and picks up a large potted red pepper plant to drop on him. Yoo Man-su is shaking slowly with a blank look on his face and the tension rising about will Yoo Man-si go through with this act of murder. We also see that the plant must have been watered recently because it is dripping onto Yoo Man-si’s head in a slow stream without him even noticing. This little detail adds a bit of levity to this intense scene without ever taking away from the fact that we do not know what will happen.
This has been played up in the marketing as the image of the film and a very prominent moment in the trailer and it is not surprising because of how well it captures the tone of the film. Yoo Man-su is a man who feels he is at his wits end and the only fix he sees is to do something unimaginable. Yet even in these dark moments the randomness of the world is there to make him look foolish and avoid making things easy for him. It doesn’t make what he is doing less horrible but it grounds the moment to avoid glamourising the act of murder.
So much complexity in one scene goes on to define Yoo Man-su’s quest for financial security that never lets us know where we will end up or how his actions will affect him and those around him. Its tension filled, horrifying and makes you giggle a bit. It is a magical balance that only master filmmaking can accomplish and what I am most thankful for.
David Phillips
From Virginia to Mexico to Oscar Consideration, My Personal Story of No Nos Moveran
While I’m tempted to point to the first portion of this community article and say, “What Clarence said,” since Hamnet is taken, it allows me to speak to another cinematic moment to celebrate: Attending the Areil Awards in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, as the guest of No Nos Moveran director, Pierre Saint-Martin. For the uninitiated, the Ariel Awards are Mexico’s equivalent of the Baftas. Regarding my relationship to the film No Nos Moveran (We Shall Not Be Moved, in English), I was asked to lead a Q&A with No Nos Moveran producer Victor Leycegui at the Virginia Film Festival (VAFF) last year. Before attending the festival, I was sent a screener of the film to prepare my questions for Victor. Considering the VAFF organizers’ good taste, I anticipated that the film would be, at minimum, solid. It was so much more than that. In telling the story of an elderly attorney named Socorro (played by the extraordinary Luisa Huertas) in Mexico City who discovers the possible identity of the soldier who killed her brother during the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, Saint-Martin’s first film (astonishing, that) fused dark humor, tragedy, and pathos to create a remarkable film that I didn’t just admire, I adored.
After having a great discussion with Victor and giving the film a well-deserved rave review, I assumed that my work was done and that would be it. But the film, this micro-budgeted indie shot in black and white and starring a sexagenarian, is the kind you root for to get seen. So, I followed the film on social media, kept in touch with Victor, and got to know Saint-Martin, and the radiant No Nos Moveran supporting actress, Agustina Quinci. While interviewing Saint-Martin, for what I assumed would be my last bit of advocacy for the film, this young, gifted director asked me if my wife and I would like to attend the Ariel Awards in Puerto Vallarta. “You’re part of this, too,” Pierre told me. Sometimes the planets really do line up, as I am a resident of that coastal Mexican city. Attending the Ariels was a remarkable experience. No Nos Moveran was nominated for 15 awards and won 4 (including Best Director for Pierre and Best Actress for Luisa Huertas). Not only that, but No Nos Moveran is Mexico’s submission for Oscar consideration for Best International Feature, as well as Spain’s Goya Awards. Over recent weeks and months, this little film, which received government funding just to get made, has received one outstanding review after another. To have been an early advocate and supporter, and then to see the film greeted with awards, Oscar and Goya buzz, and a U.S. release, has been one of the great privileges of my writing career and my life.
Megan McLachlan
Hooray For Television
I’m thankful for incredible television like Dying for Sex, which speaks so candidly about sex and death, and The Pitt, which honors those who work in the realm of life and death. What a great year for TV!
Joey Moser
Shorts Shorts Shorts
Yes, I cover shorts for the site, but I hope that film lovers take the time to check out short films outside the Oscar race. I was thankful to attend my first shorts film festival this year, and I hope to go to more. If I could call out any short films this season, I’d shout out Alexander Farah’s One Day This Kid. It’s queer, it’s emotional, it’s everything you need for the holiday!
