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.