Welcome friends.

As always, our final episode of a calendar year is a look back at our cinematic highlights, structured around Neil’s and my top ten films lists. We always try to put this in something of a broader context, suggesting the always subjective criteria of judgement that go into our selections and the sense of incompleteness, compromise and general fallibility of ranking one’s artistic pleasure and admiration. But Neil is right when he comments on the show that lists are a way of organising thought amid the incessant noise of cultural overload.

That question of structure becomes a recurring preoccupation across the conversation. Neil mentions that, when assembling his ten, he found himself instinctively pairing films; spotting “cousins” that echo each other in tone, narrative, or thematic focus.

This is something of a recognition that cinematic appreciation often works through a clustering: films that don’t merely share “topics” (capitalism, community, violence, grief), but share strategies for coping with a world that increasingly refuses coherence.

For me, an undeniable feature of 2025 in cinema has been the many narratives that reflect a feeling of senselessness—stories that don’t “resolve” so much as metabolise disorder. We keep circling filmmakers who can register the insanity of the present without converting it into a tidy thesis. Radu Jude is the obvious touchstone here: we talk about how his filmmaking avoids the temptation of big declarative statements, holding sincerity and cynicism, humour and despair, in the same hand.

Kontinental 25, as much as any other film this year, explores the granular experience of politics as a kind of moral nausea, digital immediacy of its form aping the doom-scroll logic of being pulled from one sickening little story to the next.

We keep returning to the sense that many “state of the nation” films this year (especially in the American context) operated as overt statements—almost insistently discursive—while, at the same time, we explored quieter, more contemplative works that approached personal and social crisis through subtler uses of form, tone, and time.

Many films this year, implicitly and explicitly, explored the tensions of capitalism as a kind of lived texture: bureaucracy, managerialism, the violence of systems that call themselves neutral. From the handheld realism of Souleymane’s Story (Boris Lojkine) right through to the expansive mythos and genre pleasures of Sinners (Ryan Coogler), the political economy of history and identity becomes a driving force.

Indeed, Neil looks beyond the reductive “folk horror” label attached to Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, reading it instead as a study of collective life, of a community’s ethical capacity being tested by difference. Yet, in the end, capitalism arrives not as an abstract system but as an administrative colonisation that annihilates any sense of physical and cultural grounding.

Political critique, meanwhile, was often built into formal aesthetics and narrative structure, delivered through inventive reworkings of familiar genres. Sinners, along with Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, were, of course, operating within the métier of horror. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk (the only film in my top ten I didn’t see at the cinema) is a brutal, unrelenting take on the speculative-dystopian trope of lethal competition, one that reads as a symbolic portrait of social psychopathy.

Alongside these political currents sits another, quieter one: the insistence that time, how it’s felt, withheld, folded, or weaponised, might be cinema’s most underappreciated tool. Neil’s mini-rant about people calling Reichardt “slow” is really about the poverty of contemporary attention. The film knows it’s slow; it’s inviting you to spend time, to register the “felt time” of what happened before the film even begins. Elsewhere, we keep noticing films that structure revelation itself as an ethical question: when do we learn things, and how do we learn them?

It’s why Nickel Boys becomes such a touchstone film for me, one that is criminally under-discussed. RaMell Ross’s attunement to memory and subjectivity, rather than objective historical biography, is realised through an innovative use of the POV shot—retooling it as an “aesthetics of alignment with empathy,” an apparatus through which we’re offered a multi-layered window into psycho-social trauma.

I don’t want to reveal all the films we discuss—particularly our top choices—which, if you’ve followed The Cinematologists podcast, might strike you as paradoxically both as you might expect and somewhat contrary to expectations.

At the end of the show, we spend a little time reflecting on The Cinematologists. We talk about the show’s ten-year run as a fitting “bracketing,” and hope it stands as a testament to a valuable, collaborative body of work. We discuss the different stages of the podcast, how it has evolved over time, and why, for various reasons in our work and personal lives, this feels like the right moment to stop.

We’re no longer “young academics,” no longer driven by the same imperative to fill a gap in the culture. And we’ve always said that if the podcast ever became a chore—or, worse, if it looked like it might compromise our friendship—it would be time to draw things to a close.

For me, I know I’ll reflect more in depth, in time, on what The Cinematologists has meant: the defining anchor of my cultural life, and a way of orienting my thoughts around the artform I love. I do need a little space, though, to adequately reckon with how much I’ve gained, the hard and soft skills that have made me a better writer, speaker, and thinker. Most importantly, producing the show with Neil for over a decade has taught me so much about the nature of collaboration, a commitment to practice, and what it means to be a friend.

And, of course, thank you so much to everyone who has listened and come with us on this journey.

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Music Credits:

‘Theme from The Cinematologists’

Written and produced by Gwenno Saunders. Mixed by Rhys Edwards. Drums, bass & guitar by Rhys Edwards. All synths by Gwenno Saunders. Published by Downtown Music Publishing.

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