[Editor’s note: To read our other selections for Best of 2025, see here]

Media comes at us so fast nowadays, and along with the fragmentation of culture that has accompanied the increasing pace of society, it become much too easy to miss great works, be they film, television, or books. Our senior editors offer a few thoughts on older works they discovered this year. 

Ryan Reft

Michael Gracie’s Better Man hit theaters in 2024, but I only caught it on a long flight recently and liked it so much I watched it again on an actual TV during a lazy Sunday afternoon. Most music biopics fail; for example, last year’s A Complete Unknown, which focused on the least interesting portion of Bob Dylan’s life, his initial rise to stardom and controversial decision to go electric. While the whole Newport Folk Festival angle worked, I think it really helps if you like Bob Dylan. Better to check out 2007’s, I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s distinctly postmodern take on Dylan, one of the slipperiest musical characters of modern American musical history. I haven’t seen this year’s Bruce Springsteen biopic, cleverly titled: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, though it does focus on Springsteen’s most compelling period, the dark midwestern Gothic of Nebraska and Darkness on the Edge of Town, both hipster favorites. 

Honestly, Straight Outta Compton (2015) is probably the best film biopic we’ve seen in the past decade. I wouldn’t rank Better Man with Straight Outta Compton, but it’s definitely better than Unknown and Deliver.  Better Man is about former Take That member and solo artist Robbie Williams. Don’t worry, I was only vaguely aware of him or the boy band in which he rose to stardom before watching it. While the story’s arc can be admittedly predictable, the musical numbers are good, and the film has a good sense of humor, probably driven by the fact the main character, Robbie Williams, is played by a CGI chimp [Editor’s note: I originally wrote monkey, but a reader noted it’s a CGI chimp rather than a monkey]. There is no denying that watching a CGI chimp consume massive amounts of cocaine and traverse European stages singing and dancing all while emoting about his daddy complex is surprisingly fulfilling. 

I’ve always liked the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley (does anyone play a spoiled rich ******* like the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, “Tommy, how’s the peepin’?”) which takes place in and around Sorrento, Italy. I had watched the first episode of the 2024 Netflix series, Ripley, based on the same Patricia Highsmith novel, last year and decided it wasn’t for me. But after contracting food poisoning one night while on vacation in Sorrento, I had a whole day in my hotel room. Despite being filmed in black and white (notable for a region awash in color), the series is gorgeous, and the characters, all of them, enormously pissy with one another. Andrew Scott as the conniving Ripley is a devious and disturbing revelation. 

A couple of years ago I was enjoying the FX series Reservation Dogs (if you haven’t seen the three-season show about a group of indigenous adolescents on a Northeastern Oklahoma reservation dealing with the suicide of one of their close friends, it’s actually extremely funny despite the daunting subject matter and it’s well worth your time), when “Cold Damn Vampires” by Zach Bryan played as one of the episodes ended. I’m not really a country music fan, but the song caught my ear, and I eventually dug into Bryan’s 2022 album from which the song came, American Heartbreak. I don’t know Bryan’s politics and I don’t want to. What I do know is the album is great especially if you’ve lost a loved one. “She’s Alright,” about the death of his mother (Bryan has several songs across a few albums about his late mother), rends one’s heart. 

With the death of David “Trugoy the Dov” Jolicoeur in 2023, I can’t recommend enough anything by the epic hip hop act, De La Soul. Since his passing, I’ve had their albums on repeat and this year I doubled down particularly on the criminally underappreciated classic, De La Soul is Dead (1991) and the masterful Stakes is High (1996). With De La Soul on the mind, I should point out, friend of the blog, historian Austin McCoy has a new book out on the band, Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made in January. Needless to say, I’m excited.

Re: De La Soul and Natives Tongues, my listening habits followed a similar arc when Phife from A Tribe Called Quest passed in 2016, just as ATCQ released its final, but really great album We Got It From Here Thank You 4 Your Service. Do I even need to mention 1991’s Low End Theory or 1993’s Midnight Marauders? Also, Outkast’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year serves as a reminder that they remain one of this century’s premier hip hop acts. Though I’m going to argue their 1990s work, ATLiens, Aquemini, and Stankonia (technically 2000, but long duree, folks) exceeds their output in the aughts, no shade to Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. 

For the heshers out there, I missed Protomartyr’s Ultimate Success of Today in 2020, but stumbled upon it this year and it’s been in my rotation for the past 12 months. I’ve long hailed the Detroit band as a postpunk cry of Motor City pride and angst, but Ultimate Success surpassed my expectations even as I listened to it five years after its release. The album features jabs at ICE that were accurate then and prescient now. While some might think it a downer, I find its ability to face America’s darkest impulses uplifting. 

Katie Uva

I have a toddler, and my wife and I are enjoying this special period of time in our lives where we are the main conduits for her media consumption. Consequently we have been leaning heavily on things we liked as kids, and it has been a pleasure introducing things to Cora and reflecting on what we liked about them then and how we perceive them now. Big hits this year have been The Wizard of Oz, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Mary Poppins, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid. In music, the songs of Ella Jenkins, Pete Seeger singing “Abiyoyo,” and The Pointer Sisters’ “Jump (For My Love)” have been durable pleasures. We’ve read many books this year, and some of our joint favorites have been Eloise, Peter’s Chair (by Ezra Jack Keats; the little boy in this story is the same Peter from The Snowy Day), Madeline, Blueberries for Sal, and Each Peach Pear Plum.

A little to the side of that, I’ve been casually looking into children’s books for kids who are older than my daughter, and just finished All-of-a-Kind-Family, which is a classic that I didn’t encounter as a child but greatly enjoyed just now. Originally published in the 1950s, it’s a series of connected vignettes about a Jewish family on the Lower East Side in 1912, and to me was evocative, charming, sweet without being cloying, and fits well into the pantheon of books like Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and the American Girl series – books that are populated with lovingly drawn characters, that take seriously the concerns and preoccupations of girls, and that have a rich sense of place and time. I’m hoping my daughter will be interested in these types of stories someday, but for now I’m enjoying visiting and revisiting them myself.

Featured image (at top): Charities, Mayor Low Protected the Citys Poor, Tammany Swindled the City and Cheated the Poor, Metropolitan Lith Studio, 1903, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.