Giving Thanks (2025)
This Thanksgiving week, I took some time to reflect on the last year and select twelve works of art (give or take) that I am thankful for from the past twelve months. (Though I missed 2024, I mean this to be a yearly tradition; see my 2023 selections here.)
(1) I am thankful for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which I saw in 70mm film on an enormous IMAX screen last December. It was an all-timer of a theatrical experience, with full body chills and everything, and I – a former skeptic – understood for the first time why people have religious experiences with this film.
(2) I am thankful for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which deserves some sort of distinction for leaving such a deep impression on me that after only one viewing (in the last week of 2024), I have hardly gone more than a week without thinking of it. When iTunes rolls out its end-of-year stats in a month, I will not be surprised if Robin Carolan’s “Daybreak,” which scores the climax, is my most-listened-to song of 2025.
(3) In the first months of 2025, I devoured the first few books of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and the entirety of its television adaptation Game of Thrones. The beginning of this year was a difficult time in many different ways all at once, and it was consoling, after a fashion, to get lost in such a vast and intricate saga. Martin’s writing lacks the grandeur and cosmological beauty of J.R.R. Tolkien (an unfair comparison, perhaps, but look at his pen name; he asked for it!), but the novels are skillfully written page-turners, and the show, however its quality might fluctuate, is robustly crafted entertainment that often imbues Martin’s characters with more humanity than is found on the page. I didn’t even hate the ending!
(4) I am thankful for Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Shame, a pastoral recommendation that proved to be the most impactful non-fiction book I read all year. It is the sort of incisive project that gives you terminology to identify things you’ve always intuitively recognized, but have never known how to articulate.
(5) I’ve gone on record about this before, but I cannot reflect on the year without saying that I had a more personal experience with The Shrouds (the latest film from David Cronenberg, who is on my shortlist of favorite directors) than with any other new movie in 2025. That’s not even a recommendation, because I have no idea if anyone else would respond to it the same way – but watching this terribly tender film in an empty theater, I felt like I was having an astonishingly intimate encounter with an artist I love.
(6) I am not sure any pop culture event this year excited me more than the second season of Andor, which aired in April and May with four blocks of three episodes at a time, so that it was like getting an incredibly rich and satisfying (and usually tragic) new Star Wars movie four weeks in a row.
(7) In April and May, leading up to the release of The Final Reckoning, I revisited all the previous Mission: Impossible installments. I’m thankful for this series, which (generally) maintains a high standard of blockbuster craftsmanship, but more than that, I’m thankful for the way it rekindled my love of cinema, inspiring me to watch some of the classic movies that inspired director Christopher McQuarrie. (My favorite of the films I discovered this way is The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s 1983 epic about the American space program). I wrote about how The Final Reckoning is a love letter to movies here.
(8) I don’t like the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and I didn’t like James Gunn’s new Superman, either, but what can I say? I am thankful for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Vol. 3, which touched me on a surprisingly deep level when I revisited them this summer. It is fashionable these days to sprinkle superhero movies with trauma tropes, but these two films are fundamentally about psychological and emotional healing in a way that goes far beyond any of their contemporaries in the comic book genre.
(9) I am thankful for two widely maligned blockbuster sequels with the word “kingdom” in the subtitle: J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Both movies constitute frankly astounding improvements on their mediocre predecessors: they are gorgeously designed, exuberantly directed, electrifyingly eclectic genre concoctions that cut through my cynicism to thrill, delight, and even inspire me. I wrote about some of the cinematic allusions in Fallen Kingdom here.
(10) I am thankful for Arthur Ransome’s lovely, gentle children’s book Swallows and Amazons, which I read in August. I find Ransome’s prose truly remarkable for the way it maintains a very adult (and very British) sense of restraint while fully inhabiting a childlike perspective, without a hint of either condescension or obvious sentimentality. The novel transitions seamlessly between real-life and make-believe such that both are charged with innocent wonder, and the effect is downright Chestertonian, at once comfortingly familiar and full of the adventurous unknown.
(11) This year, I am thankful for not one, not two, but three big-budget Gothic genre movies by filmmakers wrestling with their Christian upbringings: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. These films are aesthetically accomplished and full of imagination, which makes them enjoyable to watch, but they are also layered with unmistakably personal themes, which makes them rewarding to think about.
(12) I am thankful for the dark ride DINOSAUR at Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando. The attraction was a favorite of mine in my dinosaur-loving youth, and I am grateful that my family managed to pay a visit to Disney World earlier this month and experience it one last time before it falls victim to Disney’s endless strip mining of their intellectual property in 2026.