Category: Recently Watched

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been rewatching The West Wing, that liberal fantasy show from the late 1990s and early 2000s that was, during its run, one of the shows that defined “prestige network television” in an era where that definition also included both Friends and Will and Grace, so… well, you know. I think that says it all. I was a big fan of The West Wing when it first ran — those more innocent days! — and it left an oversize, unreasonable fondness for the works of Aaron Sorkin that have seen me watching both The Newsroom and, worse, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on more than one occasion. (Yes, I am that person who has watched Studio 60 more than once.)

I dove into this West Wing rewatch with no small level of cynicism because, bluntly, history has not been kind to politics or the kind of “People are just goshdarn good deep down” fantasizing that the show is ultimately rooted in; I was lured in by watching Martin Sheen and Dule Hill talk about the show in March for work, and the fact that it was available on HBO Max and, honestly, I didn’t think I’d last more than a couple episodes. As I write this, I’m just starting the fifth season, so you can tell how that worked out.

A lot of what kept me around was the writing, of course. Yes, The West Wing has not aged well in many respects — not least of which is its unerring optimism in “America” as a concept, and Aaron Sorkin’s tendency to scold anyone who doesn’t live up to his stated ideals as expressed through whatever mouthpiece he’s writing at the moment — but the first couple of seasons still crackle with a writer realizing the freedom and scope a television show gives him to follow whims, and a sense of humor (and, bluntly, lots of I’d-forgotten-how-fun writer jokes, too) that are hard to resist. The show is sillier in its early days, and that’s a pretty good way for me to fall back in love with it.

What’s also got me this go around is seeing the show in its historical perspective. What changes between seasons 2 and 3 is, simply, 9/11 happens and you can feel that throughout the second half of Sorkin’s run as writer; he’s visibly knocked off course by it and the show changes in all these fascinating ways as a result, some of which were, I suspect, not even entirely intentional on his part. It becomes way more centrist in its outlook and there’s a lot more emphasis on “good Republicans” showing up, for one thing; it becomes more self-serious and far preachier, with more stories about terrorism, domestic and otherwise. You can see Sorkin get thrown off his game and struggle to find a new rhythm, and it’s neither graceful nor subtle, but all the more fascinating for that.

Things only get worse from here, of course: after Sorkin was fired, the writing plummets in quality and characters start acting wildly out-of-character. Will I bail before that happens, or stay the course? It depends how emotionally masochistic I’m feeling over the next few weeks, I guess — although the true test of that last point will come if I decide to follow up The West Wing with yet another Studio 60 run-through. Surely not. And… yet…?

Anoher month where I wasn’t really watching that many movies, because my brain felt as if it was time to watch TV shows and/or do something else entirely altogether; I blame the fact that I somehow fell fully into a rewatch of The West Wing, more than anything else. (Eight of the films in the list below are shorts, so it looks deceptively long.) Nonetheless, I want to call out the following things:

• Gimme Danger, a documentary about the Stooges and Iggy Pop’s early career, is a genuine joy, and left me with all manner of warm feelings about Mr. Iguana Pop himself.
• Cool World is fascinatingly bad; it’s one of those movies that you watch, and then go research because it’s so bad and you wonder what kind of shenanigans went on behind the scenes, because surely that was no-one’s artistic vision. (Shenanigans did in fact go on behind the scenes, but having read up on what the original vision of the movie was, I’m not sure it would’ve been that much better.)
• The fact that The Housemaid was a massive hit and out-earned Sinners at the box office last year is truly depressing, now that I’ve seen both movies. The Housemaid is so flat and dull that it did little beyond convince me that Sydney Sweeney has anti-charisma.
• Teenage Superstars — a documentary about the Scottish indie music scene of the 1980s and (very) early 1990s — made me very happy not just for nostalgic reasons (but also, definitely that) but because it’s full of people telling the smallest story imaginable with good humor and occasionally a funny joke.
• I re-watched R.E.M.: Road Movie and R.E.M.: Tourfilm in one evening, speaking of music and 1980s/90s nostalgia. I wore both of those movies out on tape when I was a kid.

All things considered, I’m surprised that there’s as many movies on my list for March as there are — especially because, midway through the month, I got so overwhelmed by work that I basically switched to watching ER and The West Wing on HBO Max as noise to try to distract my racing brain, as opposed to actually paying attention to anything, because my head was so busy. Despite that, I got to see three great movies amongst everything else in the last month — hi, Project Hail Mary, Challengers (which I’d somehow avoided before, I think due to the hype? But I loved it!) and Sentimental Value, which really hit me hard. The two Gorillaz documentaries I finished the month with were both in their own ways flawed, but interesting enough to keep my interest. Maybe I’m headed back into documentary mode — after I get out of John Wells-produced procedural drama mode, of course.

A documentary-heavy February, but absolutely nothing wrong with that — especially when the documentaries in question (every single one pop culture related, because I am a man who knows what he likes, apparently) are as watchable as the ones in February were. In terms of fiction movies, I feel like I saw some winners as well: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Predator: Badlands and Blue Moon were all things I can see myself returning to in the future to appreciate again; Blue Moon in particular really left its mark on me.

Here’s what I watched in February.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the variety of viewing experiences January brought me, from the utter disappointment and exhaustion of the series finale of Stranger Things to my crying multiple times while watching Come See Me In The Good Light, which utterly emotionally wrecked me. There was no particular rhyme nor reason to my January watches, but that feels entirely right for the first month of the year. It’s a recovery month, a stuttering-into-life month after the holidays. I watched some good stuff, and I watched some utter trash. (Beyond Stranger Things, let’s call out Tron: Ares for also being terrible; at least the disappointment of A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey was rooted in some kind of ambition that it could never hope to fulfill.) As far as first steps into the year go, I could have made worse ones.

As is traditional, so much of my December 2025 viewing was holiday related, although I snuck in a couple of movies that people were talking about in “Best of the Year” terms, just because; of those, F1 felt like the ideal Dad Movie — leaning into every single cliche and relying on the allure of “cars go fast, broom broom” to win the audience over… and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t work; I was less won over by One Battle After Another, which felt too cartoonish and weightless to land with me, while Die My Love — a Christmas Day watch, inexplicably! — was harrowing and beautiful in all the right ways. What lies ahead for movies in 2026? Well, more of them, I’m sure… beyond that, I’m not even going to pretend to predict anything.

1. I could not tell you why, but watching the final season, and especially the final episode, I kept thinking to myself Avengers: Endgame has ruined pop culture. Again, I am not entirely sure where this thought came from other than how exhausting the whole thing felt, and how familiar that was to the way I felt about Endgame — and perhaps also the way that both narratives went from a cliffhanger of “this is an unbeatable, existential threat” to “if we just hit these bad guys with sticks, everything will be solved” in a way that felt utterly unearned — but I’m standing by it.
2. My God, but the final season of Stranger Things was a slog to get through. It’s a good thing it was on Netflix, because that allowed me to continually walk away from episodes and return to them when I’d regained the strength to go on. It took me three days to watch the finale, all told, including watching three full other movies in between. (Each of which was more entertaining.)
3. Why, exactly, was Linda Hamilton there, aside from the paycheck? What purpose did her character serve? (For that matter, what was her character’s motivation? That was never explained, beyond other character’s guesses. Isn’t that kind of thing important?) I think back to her giving interviews where she’d say things like, “I’d more or less retired, but Stranger Things made me believe in acting again,” and all I can imagine is that she’s being polite about an experience that feels like it must have been someone saying, “Can you frown again, but do so while looking in this direction?” and then she went back to her trailer and looked up her bank balance again.
4. If you told me that the writers room knew what they wanted the last hour of the show to be, and basically went, “Eh, we’ll wing it until we get there,” I’d believe you; the epilogue/last half of the finale felt more concrete than any of the eight-or-so hours that preceded it.
5. I wanted to walk away from this show before this final season, having lost interest in it… somewhere at the start of the fourth season, maybe? Perhaps not, I remember getting to the cliffhanger and going, I wonder how they’ll pull this off. But I stuck with the entire final season out of a sense of obligation because it was so big culturally that it felt like work, and in part because I was hate-watching by the second half. All things considered, I should have listened to that initial impulse and stayed away; there wasn’t anything here worth the investment in time, and I feel like I could have done so much better with those hours even if I’d just laid on the couch and did nothing. A lesson to bear in mind throughout 2026, perhaps.

November 2025 was, ultimately, the month in which I realize I appreciated Richard Linklater’s more mannered, albeit exceptionally playful and fast-paced Nouvelle Vague than the movie it’s about, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. (Breathless suffers from the Beatles effect for me; I’m so familiar with the things it’s been ripped off for that the movie itself seems lesser as a result.) That said, I loved the Linklater movie, somewhat surprisingly; I generally don’t appreciate his work, but this one sang to me. Movie of the month for me, a title shared with the Demi Adejuyigbe comedy special.

Less successful: After the Hunt, which was genuinely insufferable, as was Kill Your Friends, a movie whose downfall was the very reason I watched it out of curiosity in the first place: “Someone made an American Psycho about Britpop set in the 1990s? That’ll be fun,” I thought, but I was wrong; it was, instead, American Psycho about Britpop set in the 1990s, in all the bad ways.

Anyway: here’s what I watched in November 2025.

The list below doesn’t show that I saw Superman twice in the theater — I really liked it! — or that the Billy Joel documentary was somehow five hours long over two separate but connected movies. (The first one was really good, the second less so, in part because there is genuinely just less material in his whole “I am successful and ruining all my relationships because no-one wants to fully address that I’m a self-sabotaging alcoholic” thing, as evidenced by the number of people offering variations on, “it’s really hard to be a success, no-one knew what he was going through” for two hours.) It is however, an accurate reflection of the movies I watched last month, including the fact that I went on a Soderbergh/Clooney kick mid-month because I didn’t have good wifi in my hotel room for San Diego Comic-Con but the three movies were on TV over a handful of nights.

(Also, you can thank Jeff Lester for me watching Charlie’s Angels, but it was great. The Shrouds, less so.)

So, I finally saw The Fantastic Four: First Steps, a movie that might have done better in its opening weekend if Marvel hadn’t opened it at exactly the same time as San Diego Comic-Con, where roughly 160,000 of its target demographic were too busy to go find a movie theater anywhere closeby. I was at more than one Marvel panel that weekend where someone on stage would ask, “Hey, who’s seen Fantastic Four? Oh, huh, less than half the room,” as if it was a surprise. Sometimes, I think people forget that there’s a limit to pop culture obsession even for people spending thousands of dollars on a convention weekend away.

Anyway, First Steps was… fine, I guess? I couldn’t help but feel as if it had the bad luck to open two weeks after Superman, a movie that was far more charming, coherent, and successful at convincing the audience that it was hopeful and optimistic and sincere — in a world where this had been the first superhero movie anyone had seen after, say, Thunderbolts or Deadpool and Wolverine, I’m sure it would’ve played differently for a lot of people, me included.

There’s one line in the movie that hit such a sour note that it’s still in my head days later: Reed Richards explaining how hard it is to be him by saying that his genius allows him to identify threats and work out “ways to hurt them before they hurt us.” I heard that and I just thought, nope, that’s not a hero, that’s the entire basis of this being a more optimistic story/world down the drain. It was one line that immediately made everything surrounding it feel more cynical and cold, and also made me feel somewhat sad about the movie and everyone involved in its creation: This is what a selfless, old-school hero looks like to you? This is what you got from all the Reed Richards in all the comics? Really?

What I love about the best Fantastic Four comics is the sense of adventure, discovery, and potential that’s on display — and, honestly, there’s little of that on display in the actual movie, with what’s there basically being a surface-level step back from outright cynicism and a muddy aesthetic. Superman made me believe in Superman; The Fantastic Four: First Steps made me believe that Marvel Studios is going to work out how to keep being Marvel Studios no matter the project.