Avid film-watching, watching films avidly

Since submitting my most recent book manuscript to my publisher in June, I threw myself into films; watching a feature a day or across several days on most days of the week, several shorts a day, nearly all on the Criterion Channel, at the last ASEACC conference in Chiang Mai, the Painting with Light art film festival, and the 2025 Singapore Film Festival. I’ve always been a watcher and writer of films, but my cine-philia went on overdrive lately, as a way of catching up if you will. I can’t say definitively how many films I’ve watched this year, but it’s likely to be more than the average person in the 2020s.

Below is a non-comprehensive list of films I’ve watched (and mostly enjoyed) in 2025 so far (Edit – this has been recently updated as of 18th Dec 2025):

1. Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime, A Tale of Autumn, and A Tale of Winter
2. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Solaris, and Stalker
3. Marva Nabili’s The Sealed Soil
4. Jean Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl and Requiem for a Vampire
5. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo
6. Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married
7. Zach Braff’s Garden State
8. Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me
9. Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody
10. Lino Brocka’s Insiang and Bona
11. Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress
12. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller
13. Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters
14. Lav Diaz’s Magellan
15. Maung Sun’s Money Has Four Legs
16. Tongpan by the Isan Film Group
17. No Other Land by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham
18. Foragers by Jumana Manna
19. Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sailed On and 8 and ½
20. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers
21. Bigas Luna’s Volaverunt
22. Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story
23. Walerian Borowczyk’s La Marge and Behind Convent Walls
24. Agnes Varda’s Mur Murs
25. David Lean’s Brief Encounter
26. Francois Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould
27. Eraserhead by David Lynch
28. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
29. Tan Siyou’s Amoeba
30. Perang Kota by Mouly Surya
31. Xiaolu Guo’s She, A Chinese
32. Persona, by Ingmar Bergman
33. A Useful Ghost, by Rachapoom Boonbunchachoke