Filmhydra
From the movie Conquest. A curly-haired young main is being attended to by two women. The one on the left is wearing what looks like a bridal veil, the one on the right has long, curly hair and is not facing the camera. The trio is seen only vaguely; a beach sunset can be seen through them.

2025 was a hard year to keep in focus; it feels like it slipped through my fingers.

2025 FINE

Where do we go from here? Which is a way that’s clear?

Wrap-up for the 2025 calendar year of movie-watching.

Socialize

What is there to say about 2025?

If you were to judge from the activity here on FilmHydra you would think it’d been a bad year for movies. It kind of was — Letterboxd reports I watched only 134 films last year, with a lot more re-watches than new-to-me films. Many of the re-watches, though, were because my partner and I were watching movies with our son. He took a film studies class in 2024 that gave him a real leg up on understanding movies, a medium he never connected with as a child or adolescent.

In 2025 we watched so many more together, and although some of the movies weren’t my favorites it means a lot to me that we got to spend that time together. And still spend that time together. We continue to raid my movie collection for films to share with him.

Around this time in 2025 we also said goodbye to my very orange friend, Cato. While we were struggling in 2024 to care for, and save the life of, our white cat Q, Cato’s health began to decline. He made multiple vet trips. The day of Trump’s inauguration our vet did an ultrasound and discovered Cato had multiple sizable tumors. He was gone within a week.

An orange and white cat is curled up around a grey tabby kitten. The orange cat, Cato, is sleeping; the grey tabby, Cheery, is looking at the camera.

Cato (orange-and-white) was my film-watching companion for many years, and I still miss him terribly.

That’s not the only reason it’s been quiet around here; much of my writing energy in 2025 went to my personal blog and writing about AI, a subject that my now seems rather exhausted but continues to disrupt everything and discomfit everyone.

Special thanks, though, to ReelWeegieMidgetReviews and Cinematic Catharsis, whose occasional blog-athons helped me write all three of the reviews I posted last year: The Assassination Bureau, Conquest, and The Case of the Bloody Iris.

Other Media

I’m not a huge fan of television, and my partner is even less of one, but a lot of the time we would have spent watching movies last year was spent watching the David Suchet Poirot series. It’s calm, understated, and dripping with art-deco brilliance — in many ways the opposite of the high melodrama modern television has become. Nevertheless, it has the most hilariously awful, peak 80s intro sequence ever:

I’ve also been reading quite a bit more, working my way through Agatha Christie’s Poirot novels as well. I’m also chipping away at Terry Pratchett’s novels; the one I most recently finished was Moving Pictures, the Discworld novel about the movie industry.

One review, The Sand, has already been published this year. I have a second in progress, and a third planned. Film Hydra is not dead, it’s only pining for the fjords. It’ll be up again in no time.

Oh, and

The weekend after Oblivion was re-released we adopted our third kitten. He is named M’aiq, after the Elder Scrolls character M’aiq the Liar.

An alert black kitten emerges from a small cat condo; his eyes are very big and yellow.

M’aiq as learned that when the TV comes on in the evening, I’m probably not moving for two hours.