Parallax View - Movie Views from Seattle

by David Coursen, by Richard T. Jameson, by Robert Horton, by Sean Axmaker, lists

Parallax View’s Best of 2025

Written by Editor January 9, 2026February 21, 2026 Leave a Comment

Most of us at Parallax View are no longer actively reviewing new films but we still try to keep up with them. And after decades of making lists like this, it’s still part of our routine. So while, even a week into January 2026, we are still catching up on some of the most celebrated films of 2025, we can’t help ourselves. Though far from definitive, these are snapshots of what we have been able to see, and what impressed us, over the last year.

Contributors in reverse alphabetical order. Films list in preferential order (unless otherwise noted).

Jeffrey Overstreet

This list of my favorite films of the year comprises only titles that opened on big screens or on streaming services in Seattle before the end of the calendar year. Thus, a lot of titles you see on other 2025 lists are missing here because they reached Seattle moviegoers after January 1, 2026, and some titles were popular on 2024 lists but didn’t reach Seattle until early 2025.

You’ll find reviews of some of these films at jeffreyoverstreet.com, my new website (under construction). More reviews of these titles are coming soon.

THE TOP NINE
Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
Eephus (Carson Lund)
It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor)
On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
Seven Walks With Mark Brown (Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton)
Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson)

ELEVEN RUNNERS-UP
I’m still arguing with myself, so any of these could climb into the top ten in the coming weeks:
A Little Prayer (Angus MacLachlan)
Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang)
Bono: Songs Of Surrender (Andrew Dominik)
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
Harvest (Athina Rachel Tsangari)
Hedda (Nia DaCosta)
Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou)
Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)
Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk (Sepideh Farsi)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Richard T. Jameson

From the top:
Sinners
One Battle after Another
It Was Just an Accident
The Secret Agent
Sentimental Value
Train Dreams
Blue Moon
Sorry, Baby
Sirāt
A House of Dynamite

Continuing more or less in order: The Mastermind, Die My Love, Nouvelle Vague, No Other Choice, 28 Years Later, Weapons, Bugonia, After the Hunt, Nuremberg, Freaky Tales, Superman

Have yet to see Hamnet, Marty Supreme, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Materialists

Robert Horton

First Tier:
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
One Battle After Another(Paul Thomas Anderson)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendoça Filho)

Second Tier:
Sirat (Oliver Laxe)
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
When Fall Is Coming (Francois Ozon)
Marty Supreme(Josh Safdie)
Weapons (Zach Cregger)
Sound of Falling (Mascha Schiliniski)
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
House of Dynamite(Kathryn Bigelow)

Not-Inconsiderable-Pleasure Tier:
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
Friendship (Andrew DeYoung)
Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)
28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)

(originally published at The Scarecrow Wire)

Michael B. Jordan and cast in Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners.’ Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Kathy Fennessy

1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
3. The Secret Agent / O Agente Secreto (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
4. Familiar Touch (Sarah Friedland)
5. 40 Acres (R.T. Thorne)
6. Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)
7. Blue Sun Palace (Constance Tsang)
8. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
9. It Was Just an Accident / Un Simple Accident (Jafar Panahi)
10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

(originally published at Andmoreagain)

David Coursen

1. Sinners, Ryan Coogler
2. One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
3. Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke
4. It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi
5. Souleymane’s Story, Boris Lojkine
6. Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof
7. I’m Still Here, Walter Salles
8. Peter Hujar’s Day, Ira Sachs
9. The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt
10. Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke.

Honorable Mentions: The Featherweight, Robert Kolodny; Grand Theft Hamlet, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane

Wagner Maura in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘The Secret Agent.’ Photo credit: Neon

Dennis Cozzalio

A Baker’s Dozen (plus one, because I just won’t be constrained by the whole number thing) of my favorites for 2025, in ascending order:
14. Merrily We Roll Along (Maria Friedman)
13. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
12. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)
11. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
10. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)
9. Wake Up, Dead Man (Rian Johnson)
8. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
7. Eephus (Carson Lund)
6. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
5. La Grazia (Paolo Sorrentino)
4. The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan)
3. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
and finally, pure catnip…
1. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)

I also liked: Becoming Led Zeppelin (Bernard Macmahon), Chain Reactions (Alexandre O. Philippe), Final Destination: Bloodlines (Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein), KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Applehans, Maggie Kang), The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence), The Monkey (Osgood Perkins), One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson), Superman (James Gunn), 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle), Weapons (Zach Cregger)

I have not yet had a chance to see either No Other Choice (Park Chan-Wook), Blue Moon (Richard Linklater) or The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho), three movies I fully expect would stir this baker’s dozen list up a bit, but so be it— as a wise candyman once said, so little time, so much to do. Others I have yet to experience include The Ugly Stepsister, The Shrouds, A House of Dynamite, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Misericordia, Dust Bunny, After the Hunt, Eddington, Jay Kelly, Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Naked Gun, Splitsville and Father Mother Sister Brother, among many others. I’ll get to them in 2026, along with other non-movie-related matters. Maybe.

Sean Axmaker

1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
2. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
3. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
4. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
5. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
6. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
7. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
8. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
9. Hamnet (Chloe Zhao)
10. A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)

Runners-up (and on another day may have made the list): Cloud (Japan), Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Embeth Davidtz), The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt), No Other Choice (South Korea), Sirāt (Oliver Laxe), Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor).

Honorable mentions and memorable cinematic experiences:
Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh), Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos), Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky), Dust Bunny (Bryan Fuller), Eephus (Carson Lund), Frankenstein (Guillermo Del Toro), Reflections in a Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani), Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson), Weapons (Zach Cregger).

There are, sadly, some significant films I have not yet seen (among them Blue Moon, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, The Sound of Falling, Father Mother Sister Brother and Peter Hujar’s Day) and hope to catch up with them soon, but as of publication this is where they stand.

Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve in Joachim Trier’s ‘Sentimental Value.’ Photo credit: Neon

Polls / Lists

Sight and Sound / BFI

Slant Magazine

RogerEbert.com

Indiewire Critic’s Poll

Seattle Film Critics Society lists

The National Society of Film Critics awards

The Seattle Film Critics Society awards

Other lists

2025 additions to the Library of Congress National Film Registry

Rotten Tomatoes Top-rated movies of 2025

Here’s the Parallax View lists for 2024

TCM remembers those we lost in 2025

by Sean Axmaker, Film Festivals, Silent Cinema

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2025

Written by Sean Axmaker November 24, 2025November 24, 2025 Leave a Comment

As the San Francisco Silent Film Festival awaits the much-anticipated reopening of a newly renovated Castro Theater, it temporarily pushed its traditional spring dates to late fall and relocated across the bridge to the beautiful Orinda Theater. A jewel of an independent theater that embraces its movie palace past with plush seats, Art Deco flourishes, and classic posters and memorabilia displayed throughout the building, it was a lovely choice for the largest silent film festival in the U.S. This year, the five-day event boasted 19 feature films, 11 shorts, and a fragment of an otherwise lost film, along the usual introductions, presentations on some of the restorations featured at the festival, and live music for every single screening.

SFSFF 2025 opened with a centenary screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. A massive hit in 1925 and one of Chaplin’s most beloved films, the epic comedy sends the Tramp into the Klondike equipped with little more than his bowler, cane, and baggy pants. It’s the little guy versus greed, hunger, and the fury of nature, his romantic idealism overcoming the cynicism and violence of the culture that (as we see later in the festival) destroyed so many.

Continue reading at Slant

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Review: Embryo

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

Attention to detail is of the essence in a fantasy film. If fantasy is to have the desired effect, everything hinges on the viewer’s willingness to suspend disbelief and submit to the film’s premises wherever they may take him. But if every shot, every moment, every idea offers only new evidence as to how unlikely the proceedings are, no viewer will sit patient for long. Only the very best science fiction films escape the need to explain and justify themselves. But Ralph Nelson’s Embryo seeks to escape it through the back door, by disclaiming any affiliation with science fiction. An opening title assures us that this film is about the possible abuses of things which are already medical possibilities. The disclaimer might have some effect, were it not for Nelson’s inattention to detail, which repeatedly emphasizes the film’s hokiness to the total exclusion of whatever credibility the Thomas-Doohan screenplay might have had to begin with.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

‘Annie Hall’ – How the Woodman’s World Got Larger

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in The Weekly (Seattle), May 1977]

Annie Hall is far and away the best movie Woody Allen has made. Much more importantly, it’s good and rich and satisfying in terms that, heretofore, have had only negative reference to Allen’s film career, demarcating the limits of his scope as a writer-director-star.

The picture was called Woody Allen Film throughout its two-year conception and realization—a title that made all-too-perfect sense with regard to the trajectory his filmmaking has been describing. With the qualified exception of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, all Allen’s films have flaunted his personal centrality as pretender to the throne of Chaplin, Keaton, or whomever you happen to uphold as the comic star-auteur par excellence. Their cast lists abound in interesting players whose actual participation often amounts to nothing more than a walk-on; very few—Gene Wilder in Sex, Jessica Harper in the weird Persona parody just before the end of Love and Death—have managed to register decisively enough to be retained on the retina of memory the next day or, indeed, as long as the film itself lasts.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Annie Hall

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977]

In Annie Hall Woody Allen has created his most personal, most serious, most painfully funny, and best film. The first three don’t necessarily imply the last, but in this case that’s the way it works out. The concern with the interrelation between comedy and pain—a transformation of the earlier Allen’s more prosaic concern with love and death—is the center of the film, as it is the center of the life of standup comic Alvy Singer, Allen’s thinly disguised portrait of himself. The simultaneous egocentricity and self-denigration implied in Allen’s portrayal of Singer—and, indeed, in Allen himself—is summed up in his delivery of a classic joke in his opening, Bergmanesque monologue. Like most of the jokes Freud cites in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, it’s not the kind of joke you laugh at: “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have me for one of its members.” True, Allen’s throwaway style evokes a chuckle; but for Alvy Singer there is more painful truth in this paradox of a joke than there is comic hilarity. It’s actually the second of two jokes that open the film, the first being an even less laughable one about life being ugly, miserable, depressing, and all too short.

The proposition that life is both agonizing and dear is sustained throughout. When record entrepreneur Tony Lacy invites Alvy Singer to a party that promises to be “very mellow,” Alvy declines, explaining, “When I get too mellow I ripen, and then I rot.” The vision of life-vs.-death pervades everything (“All the books you ever gave me had Death in the title,” girlfriend Annie Hall complains), and the double-layered vision is reflected emphatically in the film’s imagery. Alvy was born and raised in a house underneath the rollercoaster at Coney Island: superficial joy on top of nervous depression: corrosive death gnawing at the underpinnings of assertive life. Alvy’s comedy—and the play he writes about himself and Annie near the end of the film—is his response to pain, and it is a fantasy response. The play ends the way Alvy wishes the real relationship with Annie had climaxed. Elsewhere he casually produces Marshall McLuhan from behind a theater lobby sign to refute the bullshit artist in the ticket line who pontificates about McLuhan without knowing his work. “If life could only be like this!” Alvy tells the camera, acknowledging and embracing his own dependence on a fantasy of a world that will reaffirm and justify him and his ideas. In the film, people on the street don’t mind being stopped by Alvy to give their point of view, or elucidate their corner of the world; and many of them seem to have information and understanding to which he is not privy, though they are happy to share it with him and offer advice.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978]

I was going to put Looking for Mr. Goodbar on my end-of-the-year list as “Best Film of 1967.” But although Richard Brooks’ self-consciously flashy techniques are at least that dated, I think even a decade ago his shallow, cheating approach to both subject and audience would have been seen for what it is. Several times in the course of the film, Brooks segues his narrative line into a surprising but dead-end sequence that—after a shock-cut back to reality—proves to have been a fantasy of the main character, Terry Dunn. The first couple of times this happens, the audience has no basis for regarding the sequence as fantasy, since Terry is never portrayed as a woman who can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy. Even later, the audience picks up on the cutaways to fantasy only because by now it is on to Brooks’s tricks. Never does the device have any integral bearing on the film’s theme or style.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Interiors

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 8, 2025November 8, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

As if to avoid distracting mumbles of “Oh, guess where he got that!” in the middle of his unashamedly imitative first non-comedy, Woody Allen gets his most Bergmanesque shot out of the way right up front. It’s a soft, dreamy, quiet interior of a woman running her hand inquiringly across a windowpane; and it establishes straightaway the film’s inside/outside polarity, with the woman seemingly trying to comprehend the shell that separates one existence from another. The glass of the window, like the wall of the eye, or the lens of the camera, is the transparent, impenetrable, inexorable demarcation between the in-here and the out-there. Nothing new; but from here Allen goes on to build a distinctly American Bergman film, accessible, even downright obvious in contrast with the Swedish master’s arcane musings.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

East Egg, West Egg, Rotten Egg: ‘The Great Gatsby’

Written by Robert C. Cumbow September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]

A film made from a novel sets itself a double task. First, like all movies, it must strive to be good cinema; second, it must try to fulfill the expectations of those who have read the book. When the book is an acknowledged classic, the second becomes more important than the first. It is then incumbent upon the critic to deal fairly with the film on both levels, for many a film has succeeded as cinema despite (or even because of) its failure as an interpretation of literature. The Great Gatsby is, alas, not one of those films.

Not that it is necessarily disappointing or dissatisfying (although what film could be fully satisfying after such a supersaturating promotion campaign?). The way to approach The Great Gatsby is to prepare to be disappointed. If you have no illusion that the film is going to be an effective representation of the novel, then far from being disappointed, you may be pleasantly surprised. But few who love the novel will be capable of such detachment.

Film Reviews

Review: Ordinary People

Written by Robert C. Cumbow September 19, 2025September 19, 2025

[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981]

Robert Redford, who is known to exercise a good deal of personal control over the films in which he is involved, has shown a near-manic fixation in recent years with embracing the sociopolitically correct position. In the excellent All the President’s Men as well as such middling efforts as Three Days of the Condor and The Electric Horseman and a downright cheat like Brubaker, the bad guys are shallow, unfeeling, and simply wrong, while the good guys enjoy at least a modicum of emotional depth and sail through the film on the wings of moral rectitude with rarely a serious contradiction or dilemma to confront. There is nothing wrong with simplistic character delineation in film: primitives like Fuller and Leone thrive on it. But Redford passes his work off as serious social realism and congratulates himself for taking a courageous position, while actually keeping the social activist side of his films thoroughly safe.

2000 Eyes, by Robert Horton, Film Reviews

2000 Eyes: The Legend of Bagger Vance

Written by Robert Horton September 19, 2025September 19, 2025 Leave a Comment

[Written for Film.com]

As an actor and director, Robert Redford seems sincerely and deeply drawn to American mythology, from the mystic fishermen of A River Runs Through It to those western archetypes the Sundance Kid and Jeremiah Johnson to that most sacred of literary mysteries, The Great Gatsby. Every minute of The Natural oozes with the urge to create myth out of Americana, which may be why that movie feels like a Redford film even though it was directed by Barry Levinson.