Noir Crime Watch: Dillinger (1945)

Watched:  01/08/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Max Nosseck

A biopic of famed gangster John Dillinger, Dillinger (1945) is really a crime drama that feels pulled from a "true crime" pulp magazine - the sort where facts will not stand in the way of a good story.  I can't tell you what's real here or not as I know two things about Dillinger - that he once broke out of jail with a fake gun, and something I can not print in a family publication like the Signal Watch.*

Anyway, this is the movie that broke Lawrence Tierney, for good or ill.  And he's solid in the movie - maybe singularly good here playing a (checks notes) absolute cold-blooded monster.  I won't get too much into Tierney as a person, but apparently he was a real asshole - like in a way you or I can't comprehend putting up with.  

Catch-Up Watch: One Battle After Another (2025)

Watched:  01/05/2026

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Well, better late than never.  This was one I absolutely wanted to see in the theater, but didn't due to circumstances.

Let's not bury the lede:  I dug the hell out of this movie.  

I suspect One Battle After Another (2025) will do well through awards season - everyone in the movie is great, it's beautifully shot, the audio and score are A-level (I hadn't heard a Jonny Greenwood score in a minute).  It's on an evergreen topic in modern drag.  That said, I haven't read any reviews and I don't know what people *think* about the movie as of yet, just seen it get many stars from folks' letterboxd accounts.  

I kept thinking about how movies are made - what choices were made.  How someone else would have turned this into something preachy, or treacly, or something that was just a standard actioner.  There's a handful of directors who maybe could have done this, but PTA walks a tightrope here, and so many others would have tilted too far one way or the other.

The Signal Watch Presents: Favorite Movies of 2025

Well, here's our wee, personal best-of list for 2025.  

• We broke down the movies we watched by-the-numbers
• We talked about what we really didn't like

These are not necessarily new movies, but they are new-to-me movies.  Of the 246 unique movies I watched this year, I also watched like 175 new-to-me movies, so these are selections from that list.

We're going to break these up into categories.

Horror 

Chabert Watch: Lost in Paradise (2026)

Watched: 01/04/2026

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dustin Rikert

Job: head of a premier fashion design studio

Location of story:  Fiji

new skill:  jungle and beach survival

Man:  Ian Harding

Job of Man: Chef!

Goes to/ Returns to: Goes to Fiji

Event:  Plane crash

Food:  fish

Again, I'd love to know what stats the Hallmark Channel has about viewership when they have Lacey Chabert in a movie.  Because someone ran the numbers and was able to show that sending a Hallmark crew and stars to Fiji was going to be profitable.

It's not the first time Chabert has wrangled a destination movie.  I've seen her in movies filmed in Malta, Ireland (once as Ireland, once doubling as Scotland), vague Europe, South Africa, Italy and I think Greece.  And for the US, I know she went to Hawaii for a movie.  I feel like she's been in Manhattan at some point.

Somehow Fiji feels particularly nuts, but off to Fiji this movie went.  

The Signal Watch Presents: Worst Movies of 2025

All right.  Let's light this candle.

• We've already broken down some numbers regarding all the movies we watched in 2025.  
• And we'll be looking at the Best of the Year for 2025.

However - this post is the end-of-the-year wrap up in which I indulge in being more than a little unkind.  

There's a school of thought that "hey, you made a movie!  Good for you!  That's hard!" that's very much an appreciation for the work someone put into something, no matter how it turned out.  But we're not here to cheer on sixth graders to whom we share a family bond playing their first band concert.  

Not for my Demographic Watch: 13 Going on 30 (2004)

Watched:  01/02/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Director:  Gary Winick

So, yeah, this movie was never aimed at me.  I'm fine with that.  It wasn't aimed at me in 2004 when I was 29, and in 2026, it's even less for me.  

It's also not very good.  And not good in ways that I don't really understand.  YMMV with Jennifer Garner as a lead, but mostly the movie is a mess while also managing to feel... boring.  

It's another in a long line of movies about someone who is young getting to be an adult - like Big, Vice-Versa or...  Shazam, I guess.  Oddly, Jenna (as a teen played by Christa B. Allen and by Garner as a 13-year-old) really wants to be... thirty?  

I'll buy the magic as the conceit, sure!  I've bought Duck Planet refugees and Ewoks.   

Mystery Watch: Wake Up Dead Man - a Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Watched:  01/01/2026

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  First

Director:  Rian Johnson

Look, I am in the bag a bit for these movies at this point.  I am not averse to a good murder mystery, and I like a quirky detective.  And since jump, I've been onboard with Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc.  

I had planned to go see this upon its theatrical release, but a confluence of events prevented this.  For good or ill, it's a Netflix movie, and after two weeks or so, they shuttled the movie over to the streamer and we finally had time to watch it.  

Honestly, I hadn't heard much about this one, and Howard gave it his usual 2.5 stars, which told me nothing, Howard.  Nothing!  And I would be more charitable than Howard, but I am also always kinder or meaner than Howard, who shoots straight down the middle most days.

In general, Wake Up Dead Man fit the bill just fine for a movie for a New Years Day.  A solid cast, an engaging mystery I was never going to solve on my own, and Kerry Washington (we will always grant extra points for Kerry Washington).  

Netflix Watch: Stranger Things - Season 5 Part 2

I don't know how many of you read comic books, especially superhero comics, but from time-to-time Marvel and DC have these absolutely massive, line-wide crossover events.  It's the sort of thing referenced in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.  But I'd argue that those movies represent a best-case scenario for an epic crossover.  The comics are rarely as coherent as those movies.

Most of the time, those mini or maxi-comics-series become a logistical mess as the plot takes over, and to raise the stakes, they keep throwing new angles on top of what we knew to the point of absurdity.  In an effort to deal with the scale, they have too many characters in the mix, and so it's like reading plot by bullet-point, often with those crazy ideas comics often do so well now not offered up just one comic issue or so at a time - the ideas are just tossed at you, one after another, until nothing means anything.  And character beats?  They only happen if they're (a) advancing the overall plot somehow or (b) setting us up for some moment in a book that will debut after the cross-over.  Mostly - the characters just go through the motions until the end.  And that's a function of "wow, there's way too many characters in this".

It's pretty bad writing and never feels particularly fulfilling to read.  

It may not be a mystery why comic book event crossovers are what I was pondering as I watched the back half of the fifth season of Stranger Things.  

Spoiler:  If you love Stranger Things, and don't feel like fighting about how I don't get it, etc... - now is a good time to find another part of the internet to enjoy.

2025 Watch: Movies By The Numbers

A Signal Watch Movie Year in Review: by the numbers

Each year we tally the number of movies watched and blogged, and then we break down what we watched into a few categories.  There's no real reason for this - no one gets a prize.  But let me do my little OCD companion piece to actually blogging all of these movies.

• Our Favorite movies of 2025
• Our Least favorite movies of 2025

Movies By The Numbers - Previous Years

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

Let's Get Started

In 2025, we watched 255 movies.  Last year we counted 253 movies, so... basically the same.  

By clicking here, you can see the spreadsheet from which this data (these data?) are derived.

Here's a weird one - because we repeat-viewed so many movies (I even watched Jaws twice this year) we only watched 246 unique movies in 2025.  However, we're considering each movie watched where a post appeared as "a movie", so it's 255...  them's the rules.

Reiner Remembrance Watch: Stand By Me (1986)

Watched:  12/30/2025

Format:  Netflix

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Rob Reiner

There's a full run of movies we could have watched to salute Rob Reiner, but I was particularly onboard with Jamie's selection of Stand By Me (1986).  

In no way is my experience unique - but I did see this in the theater at eleven years old (I guess my parents were not deterred by an R rating), and it became a movie I watched over and over on VHS - rented and then taped off HBO at some point.  The soundtrack became part of my rotation, and is likely ground zero for my interest in Buddy Holly.  (There's a different conversation about how I was as likely to have my radio set to an oldies station as a pop station growing up, anyway, but you get the picture).  We adopted slang I use to this day - I am still known to describe things as "boss".  

If Stranger Things is any indication, with the right material, we can relate more to the ages of characters and the universality of that experience than anything about eras in which stories appear.  And I did.