I rang in the new year with an unexpected trip to St. Barts that ended up with friends.

I made a resolution in 2025 to watch more films. It’s an art form I have many friends in and when we have hung out I realized how shallow my understanding of the canon of film was. I have a lot of catch-up to do, and it also required a lifestyle change as I’m usually at a laptop so to make the space to enjoy a film for a few hours was a departuture from my normal routines.

I watched 72 movies last year! This definitely came at the cost of books finished, if I look at my stats. But I’ve begun to really appreciate the contours of what I love about a movie now.

This is a long lead to recommend the movie Jay Kelly, which streams on Netflix with George Clooney and Adam Sandler. After seeing many great and terrible movies, old and new, I really appreciated what they did with this film, and it was one of the rare ones I watched entirely or in sections several times, gaining new appreciation for what they pulled off.

It starts with a “One-er,” which is a continuous shot with no cuts that moves between a number of different scenes in a really slick way. (Excellent episode of The Studio about this!) It’s a film way of showing off, as it must be incredibly hard to have hundreds of people all pulling off something flawlessly for a long period of time, not unlike a Broadway show.

Jay Kelly is George Clooney playing himself, which as he says is the hardest thing to do. There are meta-levels of reality and fiction and so many allusions and callbacks the entire thing is a work of art. You learn to appreciate what actors do, and how film is made, while watching a film being done in such a nice way.

So that is my recommendation from the year. In older movies I really enjoyed Kate & Leopold, which also includes an amazing Sting song that is impossible to find on streaming.