2025 in the rearview

Happy New Year, Viscerals!

I know I say this every year, but this year seemed particularly exhausting. It's been kind of wild in many ways, with stuff I can talk about and stuff I can't, but it felt (to us, at least) like a year of setting up the bowling pins in place to (hopefully) knock down in 2026. 

It felt like a year of closing off old avenues, of leaving behind things that were bad or toxic (habits, jobs, situations), clearing the decks for a new, refreshed era, finding us a year older but perhaps a little wiser. 

After our beautiful fur girl Mally passed away at the robust age of 17 in July 2024, we felt it would be a great way to start 2025 by opening our home to another kitten, so on January 3rd, we adopted a little furry madman named Crowley (full name: Anthony J. Crowley Pyewacket Nelson-Cummings) who immediately brought chaos and energy as well as love into our lives, and we now couldn't imagine our little home without him. ​

As well as our own new baby, our extended family, which, as of Christmas Day 2024, contained no actual babies, grew by three by year's end. On Boxing Day last year, I became an uncle as my brother and his wife brought their first little boy into the world, then in June I became a Step-Grandparent for the first time as Pez's eldest daughter and her husband had a little girl, and then in November, I became an uncle again as my brother (on my mum's side) and his partner gave birth to their first daughter (and my brother's second child). My sister Taylor and her partner Kieran also adopted a beautiful puppy, Olive, to further boost the fur baby count. So our Christmas was a bit hectic, traveling over 1800km across two states to spend time with all the newly extended families, as well as my eldest sister and her husband, as well as the nephew I'd not seen since he was 5 or 6 (he's now in his early 20s). So the festive season was draining, but a lovely experience. 

From a more professional standpoint, we successfully raised over $8,000 -- boosted to over $13,000 with a matched grant from Creative Partnerships Australia -- to make our new short film, Release, for which we are currently deep into pre-production, with shooting planned for late January and into February of 2026. An unsettling psychological drama about a damaged woman prematurely released from a psychiatric institution after a quarter century inside, and her struggles to adapt to the new and unpredictable world outside, with Release we're hoping to explore and experiment with levels of preparation, rigour and style that we've never tried before, which is exciting for us (and slightly terrifying). 

Pez also finished an incredible rewrite of a feature screenplay we've had in the works for years, really sharpening it to the finest shape it's ever been in, which has been backed up by some truly lovely response we've had from a couple of professional script assessors, so part of Pez's 2026 will be doing the last few nips-and-tucks to make this one even sharper before launching it into market and trying to -- gasp! -- attach talent and producers...

The project we can't really go into yet is a documentary project -- again, uncharted territory for us -- which was cooked up by friends new and old over a few drinks but, once we all started taking real, tangible steps to flesh it out, has moved like wildfire through early development, faster than any project we've ever been involved with! It's been a wild ride already, and we're thrilled and intrigued to see where it leads in 2026... Stay tuned.

All of this -- the short film pre-production, the documentary development, the family events and obligations, as well as some personal stuff (such as... leaving my old job -- the less said there, the better -- deciding to focus on filmmaking and development, recording a fistful of audio commentaries, writing my very first booklet essay, making my first video essay -- which was scotched due to rights issues, so became my second booklet essay, and having my first ever dental surgery), this has been one of the busiest years of mine and Pez's lives, and we're so grateful for even a brief pocket of time at the end of this year/start of next year to get some rest and relaxation before it all starts again. So that was our year: crazy cat, crazy kids, crazy projects, crazy life. Oh, I turned 50 as well. Crazy. 

Shall we get to the countdowns?

Paul Anthony Nelson's Top 10
​Retro Revelations of 2025

Yeah, I'm only doing a top 10 this year, due to time constraints and ease of readability, but I will list the films that were very unlucky to miss out on this year's list of first-time film discoveries (anything made before 2020)... Inherit The Wind (1960, Stanley Kramer), The Entertainer (1960, Tony Richardson), Working Girls (1986, Lizzie Borden), Seven Days in May (1964, John Frankenheimer), Titicut Follies (1967, Frederick Wiseman), Never Take Sweets From a Stranger (1960, Cyril Frankel), Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa), Eve's Bayou (1997, Kasi Lemmons), The Bad Sleep Well (1960, Akira Kurosawa), Fascination (1979, Jean Rollin), Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini), Stagefright (1987, Michele Soavi), The First Great Train Robbery (1978, Michael Crichton), Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960, Peter Brook), The League of Gentlemen (1960, Basil Dearden), Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960, Roger Corman). 

However, from a pool of 107 films, these are the 10 that lit my fire the most...

10. PERFECT BLUE (1997; director: Satoshi Kon)
A deeply stressful picture. As someone who identifies as anime-allergic, this went down like a smooth, disturbing cup of arsenic. Big Brian De Palma vibes in this great horror film about fame, artistic demands, fractured identity and the daily terrors inflicted upon women in the entertainment business (let alone society). 

9. LA VÉRITÉ (aka THE TRUTH; 1960; dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot)
Clouzot's courtroom drama about a free-spirited young woman (Brigitte Bardot) put on trial for murdering her lover, this is a brilliant exploration of the lies patriarchal societies fashion about women, punishing them when they try to live outside the lines. Feels very relevant now, and a reminder of how good Bardot could be when she had the right role. 

8. THE GOOD GIRLS (1960; dir: Claude Chabrol) 
Speaking of films that feel relevant today, I did not expect this to be a French New Wave Looking For Mr. Goodbar, but here we are. Following four young French women living their lives, it's lots of fun when it’s not completely unnerving (much like most young women’s dating experiences). Every woman we lose to male violence is a world cut short. 

​7. THE BAD SEED (1957; dir: Mervyn LeRoy)
The O.G. "killer kid" movie is a crazy one in many ways, but also genuinely effective. While it makes little attempt to hide its Broadway origins, its high points are SO dizzyingly high that it can’t help but leave a mark. In spite of its indulgences, campier delights and whacko ending, there's stuff in here -- a mother grieving for her child, a blow-by-blow account of a murder and a moment of true mania -- that are hard to get out of your head. 
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6. THE BOY FRIEND (1972; dir: Ken Russell) 
​‘70s musicals are a soft spot of mine — mixing old-school production values and rousing numbers with New Wave/Hollywood grit, grime and emotional honesty — and mad genius Ken Russell doesn't disappoint. A valentine to British music halls, Busby Berkeley choreography, backstage shenanigans and bordering-on-assaultive Theatre Kid exuberance, it's a sheer delight!

5. TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988; dir: Francis Ford Coppola)
Our year began with a deep dive into Coppola's filmography, and this was by far my fondest new discovery: a biopic both rousing and sad, an ode to idealism and creativity, extolling the possibilities of capitalist American ideals while highlighting how quickly they become corrupted and how broken and gamed the system is. If anyone’s looking for the skeleton key to who Coppola is as a man, artist, dreamer and gambler, this film is it.

4. LE TROU (aka THE HOLE; 1960; dir: Jacques Becker)
Becker's prison break procedural tunnelled so future classics like Escape From Alcatraz, The Shawshank Redemption and their ilk could run free. Builds its characters through observation - how they negotiate incarceration, their cellmates and the process of escape - leading to a shattering ending. It's to prison break movies what Army of Shadows is to WWII spy/resistance movies, and I promise you'll never be more riveted by watching sweaty men hammer at cement for minutes on end. 

3. SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1960; dir: Karel Reisz) 
One of the foundational films of the British New Wave, Reisz' social realist hand grenade is somehow both bleak and beautiful study in post-war masculinity and humanity, full of emotional honesty, complex but ultimately loving family dynamics, poetically shot urban squalor and ace work from newcomers Shirley Anne Field, stunning and quietly steely, and Albert Finney in his first lead role, hitting the screen like a hurricane. 

2. THE CANDIDATE (1972; dir: Michael Ritchie) 
As great a drama as any I've seen about how political idealism mashes up against the compromised and homogenised reality of the political machine, and a reminder of what Robert Redford gave us, as an actor, star, filmmaker (he’s a producer here) and activist: an artist who dug beneath the surface of the American condition in a tireless search for the truth, acknowledging its possibility while revealing its corrosive flaws, to help a nation better know itself, to hope it could do the work to be better. 

1. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974; dir: John Cassavetes)
​I'm kind of addicted to, and invigorated by, the way Cassavetes' films and his peerless casts investigate humanity, in all its messiest, weirdest, irrational, ugliest, most loving, hateful and honest guises. Gena Rowlands is the show here, playing a woman stretched beyond snapping point by obligation and societal pressures to hold herself and family together, while her husband (Peter Falk, also incredible), seemingly loving but probably more harmful than good, struggles to hold her together, making terrible decisions at almost every step, while their kids heartbreakingly battle to withstand their parents' erupting storms. A seismic work of indie cinema. 

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Paul Anthony Nelson's Top 10
​New Release Films of 2025

I saw 93 new movies this year, way up from 70 last year, and the high-60s of previous years, mostly thanks to a new part-time job where I basically watch movies for a living (ie. quality checking digital files to screen in cinemas and on TV/streaming). 

As usual, for the purposes of this list, "New Releases" are feature films I saw this year that received their premiere paid public release — whether in cinemas, on streaming, rental, or at festivals — in Australia during 2025.​ 
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There were very few films I hated this year (I've got a reasonably good radar for what I'll like, so I'm not buying tickets to, say, A Minecraft Movie); in fact, of the 93 I saw, I largely liked 78, really liked 53, and loved exactly 20. But of those, 12 - rather than 10 - really got into my head this year. So let's kick off with my... 

HONOURABLE MENTIONS (from 20-13)

James Litchfield's quietly deranged, oddly romantic Alphabet Lane, Sepideh Farsi's heartbreaking document of Palestinian humanity Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk, Anthony Frith's hilarious account of making The Asylum's first Australian film Mockbuster, Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni's equal parts inspirational and aggravating portrait of a Iranian trailblazer in Cutting Through Rocks, Alexandre O. Phillippe's absorbing Texas Chain Saw Massacre deep dive (with astonishing B-roll footage!) Chain Reactions, Zach Cregger's wildly entertaining ensemble horror Weapons, Michael Morris' unexpectedly thoughtful and moving Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, and James Gunn's invigoratingly comic-bookish and heartfelt DC relaunch Superman. 

But here were the 12 new release films I loved the most this year... 

12. PENNY LANE IS DEAD
​(dir: Mia'Kate Russell)
​Full disclosure: Russell is a very good friend of mine. Also full disclosure: I'd be wowed by this film even if I'd never met her. This '80s-set One Bad Night nail-biter is everything I want in a new pop-horror flick: super-fun and airtight, with a sharp and expedient approach to revealing character and story, a fun and likeable cast and a new female villain for the ages. A perfect Ozploitation throwback with some killer needle drops and blood and gore galore. Premiering at the 2025 Adelaide Film Festival but coming to more festivals and cinemas in 2026, it absolutely lives to be seen with an audience. Ya moll!

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11. THE BALTI-MORONS (dir: Jay Duplass)
​Don't believe the title: this is a genuinely sweet rom-com-adjacent character piece more akin to something like The Holdovers than a Dumb and Dumber-style comedy. The script, credited to director Duplass (his first film in 13 years) and improv artist/star Michael Strassner, is mostly improvised, but the film's as tight as a drum, and a magnificent showcase for Strassner and co-star Liz Larsen, as two bruised adults with little in common but their loneliness. Such a beautiful, big-hearted, human story of loneliness, mental illness, ageing, community, and dunking on Baltimore Ravens fans. And it's a Christmas movie! A surprise worth seeking out. 

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10. DIE MY LOVE (dir: Lynne Ramsay)
​Nobody locks you into a character’s head - and throws away the key - like Lynne Ramsay. From the opening shot to the quietly devastating closer, it's a disquieting, white-knuckle, but also darkly funny emotional headtrip of an increasingly unwell, but often justifiably angry, woman on the edge, without any help from those who supposedly love her. The trust Ramsay builds with her actors must be extraordinary, encouraging such open, raw, violent emotional exploration. There’s abundant emotional reality underpinning every move, no matter how berserk or outré it may seem. Lawrence is tremendous, while Pattinson, Spacek and Nolte, even in small scenes, deliver their best work in years. 

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9. SORRY, BABY (dir: Eva Victor)
​A lovely film about the journey of healing from trauma, one that feels so heartfelt and honest, infused with as much humour, tenderness and humanity as it is with hurt, shock and anger. The framing and visual storytelling had a mature graphic novel sensibility I found disarming as well; occasionally reminiscent of something like Daniel Clowes’ work. Loved this so much. On both sides of the camera, Eva Victor proves themself a hell of a talent. Beautiful work from Naomi Ackie, Hetienne Park and (especially) John Carroll Lynch, too, powerfully moving me at moments I didn’t expect.

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8. THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO (dir: Diego Céspedes)
​Imagine a desolate world where a gruff all-male mining town sits side-by-side with a small outpost of a queer chosen family of drag queens, somewhere in the 1980s, where myths about transmission of a mysterious new disease abound: welcome to the world of this stirring modern fairytale of empathy and connection, sparkling and grimy in equal measure, which starts by confronting prejudice and fear and winds up in a place as beautiful and transcendent as it is unexpected. A true original.

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7. THE UGLY STEPSISTER
​(dir: ​Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt)
​Both a visually exquisite throwback to Czech fantasy-horror tales of the 1970s and a perfect modern feminist fable about the societal pressures placed on women to be beautiful, desirable and socially graceful, Blichfeldt's debut (how??) turns the Cinderella story on its head in this grimly funny, gut-wrenching body horror film, with a lead performance by Lea Myren that holds nothing back and, most of all, grounds the film in unexpected empathy.

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6. THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG
​(dir: Mohammad Rasoulof)
Made under clandestine circumstances in Iran, this is a forensic examination of a waking nightmare so many women are forced to live daily delivered as a gripping piece of genre cinema. Makes a specific situation (the everyday effects of the wider misogyny and fascism of the Iranian state) frighteningly relatable, while working as an unbearably tense thriller… which veers into unexpected territory (think The Shining) that feels completely in step with what precedes it, both in terms of story and themes. Breathlessly great. 

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5. HARD TRUTHS (dir: Mike Leigh)
​The old master returns with his best character study in years, with Marianne-Jean Baptiste delivering an open nerve of a performance as a character so consumed by sadness, disappointment and rage that her only response to the world is to witheringly hate on it at every turn. Incredibly funny at times and heartbreakingly sad at others, the way this looks at family, unresolved wounds and the state of our current world is unceasingly intelligent, perceptive and poignant. 

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4. THE LONG WALK (dir: Francis Lawrence)
The best of the year's many Stephen King adaptations is immediately moving, locking into its characters and situation with ferocious economy, before throwing us into hell, anchored by an all-timer of a bromance at its centre. A picture of an America so fundamentally broken that its biggest hope and thrill is watching 50 young men shuffling toward a dangling carrot promising unimaginable wealth or certain death, it may feel too real for too many right now, but a more compelling metaphor you'll scarcely find. A bracing, disturbing, thrilling and genuinely moving experience. I didn't know Francis Lawrence had this in him!

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3. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
​(dir: Paul Thomas Anderson)
​I love that PTA’s most explicitly political film (since There Will Be Blood, at least) is also his most escapist; full of fun and complex characters we care deeply about (or find hilarious), innovative car chases, laugh-out-loud humour and white-knuckle suspense, all wrapped in a tense structure with a lovely father-daughter dynamic at its core, and a revolutionary spirit that couldn’t be more plugged into 2025. While it’s an unsettling vision of the fault lines (or tunnels) that run beneath modern America, I can’t stress enough how fun this picture is. 

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2. BRING HER BACK
​(dir: Danny and Michael Philippou)
​I wasn't as wowed by Talk To Me as most, so I was completely disarmed by how much I loved this. As fully realised and satisfying a horror film as I’ve seen in years: tightly plotted, draws its characters in quick, clear strokes (beautifully played by all, especially Sally Hawkins as a great modern monster), fearlessly goes to unrelentingly bleak places, ups the complication stressfully, fashions one of the most original methods of necromancy I've ever seen and ends with a subtle grace note that is genuinely moving. It’s not a fun time, but a deeply terrifying one.

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...and my #1 film of 2025 is...

1. IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
​(dir: Jafar Panahi)
​Finally free (briefly?) of prison and house arrest, Panahi maintains the rage and cements himself as one of modern cinema's greatest storytellers with this clarion call of rage from a deeply personal place that manages to be relentlessly entertaining, frequently funny and breathlessly tense, with a brilliantly-drawn ragtag band of deeply broken characters at its centre (all played by non-professional actors, which is astonishing, given how brilliant they all are), leading to a truly confronting conclusion, this is a masterpiece - both timely and enduring - that you won't soon forget. 

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Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it! From us at Cinema Viscera, we wish you and yours - and the world entire - a hugely happy and healthy 2026. 

Love and cinema,
​P&P xo

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The 93 eligible films I saw this year were... 
1000 WOMEN IN HORROR  
28 YEARS LATER  
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN  
A USEFUL GHOST  
ABIGAIL  
BAD SHABBOS  
BEAST OF WAR  
BLACK BAG  
BLACK PHONE 2  
BLUE MOON  
BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY  
BRING HER BACK  
BUGONIA  
BUNNY  
CHAIN REACTIONS  
CLOUD  
COMPANION  
CONCLAVE  
CUTTING THROUGH ROCKS  
DANGEROUS ANIMALS  
DEAD OF WINTER  
DEATHGASM II: GOREMAGEDDON  
DIE MY LOVE  
DROP  
EDDINGTON  
EMILIA PEREZ  
ENZO  
F1  
FAMILIAR TOUCH  
FRANKENSTEIN  
GOOD BOY  
HAPPYEND

​HEART EYES
​IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT  
JOHN CANDY: I LIKE ME  
LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS  
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING  
MOCKBUSTER  
MOTHER’S BABY  
MOUNTAINHEAD  
MY PLACE IS HERE  
NICKEL BOYS  
NOSFERATU  
NOUVELLE VAGUE  
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER  
ONE MORE SHOT  
PENNY LANE IS DEAD  
PRINCESS GOLDENHAIR  
PUT YOUR SOUL ON YOUR HAND AND WALK  
REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND  
ROMERÍA  
SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS  
SENTIMENTAL VALUE  
SING SING
SINNERS  
SORRY, BABY  
SPREADSHEET CHAMPIONS  
SUPERMAN  
THE BALTIMORONS  
​THE BOY WITH PINK TROUSERS  
THE BRUTALIST  

THE CATS OF GOKOGU SHRINE  
THE CODE  
​THE CONJURING: LAST RITES  
THE DEAD THING  
THE FANTASTIC 4: FIRST STEPS  
THE GLORY OF LIFE  
THE GOLDEN SPURTLE  
THE LAST SHOWGIRL  
THE LEGEND OF OCHI  
THE LIFE OF CHUCK  
THE LITTLE SISTER  
THE LONG WALK  
THE MASTERMIND  
THE MONKEY  
THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE
​       OF THE FLAMINGO  
THE PHOENICAN SCHEME  
THE RUNNING MAN  
THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG  
THE STOLEN PAINTING (aka AUCTION)  
THE UGLY STEPSISTER  
THE UNHOLY TRINITY  
THUNDERBOLTS*  
TOGETHER  
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY  
WE LIVE IN TIME
WEAPONS  
WHAT WE WANTED TO BE  
WOLF MAN  
YOUNG MOTHERS  
ZOMBUCHA!