Amid the hum and hullabaloo of pre-Christmas activities, Amy Welborn and I found time to meet at Cahaba Brewing Co. in Avondale, where we discussed what we enjoyed (and, well, didn’t enjoy!) about 2025. Though interspersed with firsthand stories about international travel and biker gangs in Pennsylvania (!), our conversation centers on culture—in particular, our respective “Best of 2025” lists in the following categories:
Movies
Television
Books
Theater
Music
So, pour a flute of champagne and join us as we look back on 2025 and get ready to usher in 2026. Te Deum laudámus!
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PS — a few additional notes, speaking only for myself and not for Amy:
I’ve had an opportunity to watch a few different things over the last week and, if possible, would’ve made a handful of changes to my “Best of 2025” lists. First, and most notably, I saw Marty Supreme on Christmas night and really liked it. If I could do it all over again, I would have situated it at number four or five on my movie list. Don’t be fooled: Marty Supreme really is a film about ping-pong. Yet, more than that, it is a movie about passion and the pursuit of excellence—to be sure, classic sports movie themes, but director/co-writer Josh Safdie and star actor Timothée Chalamet (who keeps living up to the hype) imbue them with fresh energy and insight.
With regard to television, I finished the Netflix miniseries The Beast in Me (created by Gabe Rotter) over the break. I might, in a good mood, have added it to my “honorable mention” list. The show features an amazing cast (Claire Danes, Matthew Rhys, Jonathan Banks), but (for me, anyway) it started getting redundant around episode three. There are eight episodes in all. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions! Finally, I recently started the miniseries Death by Lightning (also on Netflix), and I think it would’ve had a very good chance of cracking my top four or five shows of the year—a fascinating, well-paced drama that probes a forgotten, yet fascinating, era in American history.
My favorite songs of 2025 do not come up in this episode, but that didn’t stop me from linking a playlist below. Some (but not all) of these songs are found on my favorite albums of 2025, which I do enumerate in my conversation with Amy. Anyway, here the songs are presented in no particular order and without commentary. It’s something of a hodgepodge. My only criterion is this: have I found myself listening to the song in question over the course of 2025? The context may have varied (long drives or workouts or writing sessions), but, in one way or another, these tracks kept turning up. I hope at least a few of you will enjoy at least a few of these songs!
Links to previous Just FYI posts that overlap with this episode ⬇️
April 30, 2025
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April 30, 2025
In December 2022, not long after wrapping up the second season of The White Lotus, filmmaker Mike White was already looking ahead to the third iteration of his popular anthology TV series. Freed from the constraints of providing new storylines for a recurring cast, White has sought to build each season of
August 27, 2025
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August 27, 2025
Prior to Eddington (2025), Ari Aster was known as an introspective and often elliptical filmmaker, whose use of horror motifs belied an underlying interest in family trauma and psychological breakdown. In his acclaimed debut feature Hereditary (2018), the tragic loss of a child eventually dovetails into a thriller about demonic possession. Yet, as Aster…
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