My favourite films this year have these things in common: they're funny (in a weird way), they're unpredictable (in an even weirder way), and they make you want to crawl out of your skin.
That's also, to a large extent, true about my other favourite bits of pop culture this year, whether it's TV series which make us cringe (or cower) in horror, or video games which relish in the player's helplessness. That's not always the case - as usual, we found time for some delightful Canadiana - but it's striking how often we were made to feel uncomfortable, unmoored, or otherwise uneasy in 2025 - and how much we enjoyed it.
Here then, are my favourites of 2025, the year that set out to discomfort us.
FILM
It begins and ends with a dead body, but very little about THE SECRET AGENT, Kleber Mendonça Filho's engrossing, nearly three-hour political thriller, is predictable. Set in 70s Brazil and featuring Brazil's greatest working actor Wagner Moura as its lead (though not its title character), this slowburn paranoid thriller doles out information in parcels, trusting the audience to remain invested even as it withholds key information for nearly half the film. Once that happens, once we learn what's actually going on - and who, exactly, "Marcelo" (Wagner) is - everything suddenly falls into place, casting new light on its many twists and turns - including all those Jaws references.
It may not be the scariest horror movie this year, but it's probably the funniest, WEAPONS taking great, self-aware, delight in its embrace - and occasional subversion of - horror movie tropes like incompetent cops, creepy kids, and basements you definitely should not go down into what the hell are you thinking. Director Zach Cregger, who got his start as a sketch comedian, demonstrates a wonderful sense of timing, ratcheting up tension until it becomes unbearable, only to puncture that tension with something so shocking you can't decide whether to laugh or scream.
Taking cringe comedy to its logical, sewer-embracing endpoint, Andrew DeYoung's FRIENDSHIP, starring alt-comedy legend and resolute weirdo Tim Robinson, is the most horrifying comedy of the year. Leveraging Robinson's anti-charismatic charm to great effect, Friendship wisely situates its action in a mostly realistic, only slightly off-kilter world, thereby gaining audience sympathy for its largely unlikeable protagonist, and his pathetic attempts to fit in with a "cool" new friend group (led by Paul Rudd, riffing on his Anchorman persona). DeYoung, who wrote and directed, is the ideal collaborator, helping to reign in Robinson's typically more vulgar tendencies, which were more prevalent - and undermined - Robinson's other major work this year, The Chair Company (a TV series I wanted to like more than I did).
TELEVISION
Seth Rogen is everywhere these days, but nowhere is he more everwhere than in Hollywood (gentle) satire THE STUDIO, which he co-created, co-directed, and partly co-wrote with longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg - and which stars Rogen as a movie mogul in way, way over his head. While The Studio certainly has the feel of modern, serialized, television, it thrives in its throwback episodic nature, each week offering a new storyline and amusing new gimmick - a Chinatown parody, a one-shotter featuring a self-parodying Sarah Polley - which takes great advantage of Rogen's coterie of celebrity friends.
Though it somewhat neuters its titular xenomorph, Noah Hawley's ALIEN: EARTH is still a delightfully macabre trip down the familiar byways and Gigeresque corridors of Aliens past. Featuring a strong ensemble cast anchored by Sydney Chandler (as the latest in a long line of "synthetic" organisms of the Predator-Alienverse) and an ever-weird Timothy Olyphant, it's actually the show's other ensemble - a menagerie of creepy-crawlies with a propensity for devouring brains and burrowing into eye sockets - who represent the real stars.
If Sterlin Harjo's breakout hit Reservation Dogs represented a bold new creative voice from a typically underrepresented community, his follow-up THE LOWDOWN proves that Harjo has plenty more stories to tell. Starring a never-better Ethan Hawke (who also appeared in Rez Dogs's finest episode), The Lowdown is a rambling, Coenesque comedy-thriller about a rough-and-tumble "truthstorian" (read: local muckraker) who stumbles into a grand conspiracy involving illicit land deals, white supremacists, rare books, and counterfeit caviar. While the Coens influence is most pronounced, this miniseries is equally indebted to that master of oddball smalltown mysteries, David Lynch - whose favourite Kyle MacLachlan appears here in a key supporting role.
GAMING
Low-budget Spanish indie title LUTO is only the latest in a long line of haunted house games, but what it lacks in originality it makes up for in eerie vibes and a singularly neat, postmodern twist: a metafictional awareness about its own status as a game. Borrowing liberally from titles like The Stanley Parable, Luto - the title translates as "mourning" - is at its best when it knowingly winks at the tropes of gaming, only to frighten players by subverting those very tropes. A psychedlic finale offers no answers, but plenty to trip out on.
For a dose of plain-ole 16-bit fun, look no further than MARVEL COSMIC INVASION, which (largely) avoids MCU synergy in favour of throwback, arcade-style side-scrolling, featuring a mix of Big Names and lesser, if no less beloved, lights. Any game which lets you team up Horse Thor (aka Beta Ray Bill) with the Guardians of the Galaxy's Phyla-Vell is all right in my book.
Neal Agarwal's insidiously addictive STIMULATION CLICKER, a self-aware parody of mind-numbing "idle games", couldn't have arrived at a better moment. Released early in 2025, very, very shortly after Oxford University Press named "brain rot" the Word of the (Previous) Year, Clicker is a fundamentally awful experience - all you do is click the screen, until you're given more things to click, unlocking yet more things to click (bouncing DVD logos, fake browser tabs, etc.), until finally the whole thing is a hideous display of the worst forms of digital entertainment. And that's the point.
Since he's already everywhere, it only makes sense to shower this year's maple laurels on Vancouver's own Seth Rogen, writer-director-producer-actor extraordinaire.
Here is a shortlist of places we encountered Seth Rogen in 2025:
Writing-directing-producing-starring in his own award-winning TV series.
As one of a trio of beloved Canucks in Aziz Ansari's Good Fortune, which also features Sandra Oh and Keanu Reeves. (The Canucks wildly outshining their American costars.)
In a Roots window display.
Improvising his way through a very funny guest-starring role as a liberally minded rabbi on Nobody Wants This.
In a slightly less funny starring role in his ongoing Platonic, which lost some of its zing in its second season, though this non-romcom - co-starring Rose Byrne - remains undeniably charming.
In way too many commercials at the height of the Blue Jays World Series run.
In a blink-and-you'll-miss it joke - and sidelong rib by his former classmate - in the latest season of Nathan Fielder's bizarrely comic The Rehearsal. (Vancouverites Fielder and Rogen, incidentally, have a long and rich shared comedic history.)
Rogen has always been great - in a supporting role on Freaks and Geeks, in another supporting role on its successor Undeclared, on which (at the age of eighteen!) he was also a staff writer, and then in an unbroken string of hits, beginning with 2005's 40-Year-Old Virgin and including such highlights as Superbad (2007), the controversial The Interview (2014), underrated Christmas classic The Night Before (2015), and, my favourite, end-of-the-world comedy This Is the End (2013), alongside fellow Canadian Jay Baruchel and a host of their comedy world buddies.
Rogen is also, famously, a decent dude, his ability to rope in a bevy of Hollywood talent on The Studio a function not solely of who he has on speed dial, but also his reputation for being a genial, welcoming presence everywhere he goes.
With some fun projects due in 2026 - including a new Muppets show, a stoner comedy from director Kristen Stewart(!), yet more The Studio - it's a banner era for Point Grey Secondary School's own Rogen.
