Seth Harris

Movie Review – Sirāt

Sirāt (2025)
Written and directed by Oliver Laxe

A man walks through a dancing crowd as deafening music booms. He walks with his preteen son, showing strangers a photograph. They shake their heads and go back to dancing. In an interview with Film Stage, director Oliver Laxe stated, “An image doesn’t have the responsibility to say something; they have to evoke something.” This is exactly what these images do. A search that feels fruitless. The people around you, distracted by the cacophony. People seeking distraction and a person seeking answers. While the film begins with a bit of a plot, the longer we spend on this journey, the less those specifics matter, and the experience becomes about the human condition in a world where violence is so sudden and devastating.

Book Review – Lapvona

Lapvona (2023)
Written by Ottessa Moshfegh

In medieval Europe is a fiefdom called Lapvona. It’s a bleak place where violence and death are so commonplace they don’t elicit much of a response from the passive bystanders. Marek is a 13-year-old boy, son to the village shepherd Jude who views his child with disgust. The boy is physically disfigured and engages in a pathological religious guilt, which sends him pin-balling between bouts of self-flagellation and self-pleasure. While Jude might be seen as the “main character”, he’s one of many voices author Ottessa Moshfegh rotates into the spotlight over the course of the bleak, satiric novel.

State of the Blog 2026

“I don’t feel enjoyment watching films that evoke passivity. If you need that kind of comfort, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t go to a spa.” — Park Chan-wook

It was 15 years ago that I started this blog. I’ve come and gone from it a few times over the years. The COVID pandemic that began in 2020 sparked the richest period of film viewing and writing I’ve ever had in my life. From then to the present accounts for just under 1,500 film viewings, if my Letterboxd stats are accurate. I’ve read hundreds of books in that period and watched over 1,000 hours of serialized programming. I started dabbling in solo tabletop roleplaying. I recorded over 100 episodes of a podcast with my wife. And then the realization came that we weren’t going to be able to keep going in the Netherlands.

Spring 2025 Digest

Podcast Episodes
Nickel Boys/Dog Man
The Seed of the Sacred Fig/The Room Next Door
The Electric State/I’m Still Here

Best Films of 2025

Collected here are links to reviews of my favorite films of 2025

The Phoenician Scheme

Reflection in a Dead Diamond

Plainclothes

Hamnet

Soundtrack to a Coup D’etat

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Universal Language

Hard Truths

It Was Just An Accident

One Battle After Another

Eddington

Movie Review – Eddington

Eddington (2025)
Written and directed by Ari Aster

I wrestled with making this or One Battle After Another my top film of the year, and I ultimately decided this should be the one. That likely won’t surprise longtime readers, as I haven’t hidden my love of Ari Aster’s work. Like everyone else, I was a little thrown off by Beau Is Afraid, but I still loved that film. There was an honesty in how Aster addressed the anxieties of the modern age—the creeping, agoraphobic paranoia that feels as if it has swallowed American society whole. He understands that we are living in a time where reality is warped to a breaking point, and with that comes a deep, growing sense of unease. If I had to compare Eddington to another film, I’d probably say Todd Haynes’s Poison: a contemporary horror story that leans more toward the slow-burn dread of Carcosa than a gory slasher.

Movie Review – One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another (2025)
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

One of the best film experiences I had in 2025 was seeing One Battle After Another with my sister. It was her first Paul Thomas Anderson film, and when we exited the theater she remarked that it might have been the best film she’s ever seen. Unlike me, she is not obsessive when it comes to movies; most of her viewing is limited to films she watches with her kids. That’s not to say they are bad ones—I’ve been recommending a lot since we moved back. Still, it was a special thing for me to introduce her to one of my favorite filmmakers, especially with a film as incredible as this one.

Movie Review – No Other Choice

No Other Choice (2025)
Written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Lee Ja-hye
Directed by Park Chan-wook

It’s always struck me as strange, bordering on obscene, how completely hands-off society is when it comes to job placement. We build entire educational systems around the promise of employability, saddle people with debt, tell them to “do everything right,” and then, at the moment where guidance would actually matter, shove them into the dark and say good luck. Even with a degree, even with experience, the expectation is that you will wander an increasingly incoherent job market on your own, refreshing dashboards like a lab rat pressing a lever for food pellets that never arrive. The application process is almost entirely online now, regardless of what boomers insist about “walking in and demanding a job.” I’ve played the LinkedIn game; I found nothing of substance. My wife did too and only ended up employed because of someone one of my sisters happened to know.

Movie Review – Train Dreams

Train Dreams (2025)
Written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
Directed by Clint Bentley

So many people speak about finding meaning in life. Something I’ve come to understand is that humans are awakening apes. We are clever creatures, cobbling together technology that can do amazing things, but we remain deeply blind when it comes to understanding our interior lives and forming meaningful connections with others. So much of our existence consists of things that simply happen, with little to no reason. We’re born to random people who may or may not be fit to raise us. We’re randomly born into an economic class that profoundly shapes the direction of our lives. Nature treats us coldly; a tornado can appear without warning and decimate everything you’ve built. Perhaps your economic class shields you from that devastation to some degree.

Movie Review – Bugonia

Bugonia (2025)
Written by Will Tracy
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

In the West, we are no longer living in a shared reality with our neighbors. I think COVID accelerated this, with the internet acting as a pipeline of ideological sludge that has led to a backslide reminiscent of the Dark Ages, but with smartphones. I have a family member who has fully embraced a reactionary mindset, going so far as to become a flat Earther. When someone has deteriorated that far into mental illness, it is beyond the ability of their family members to help them; only someone professionally trained will have the patience, while I am too emotionally entangled. This person has always held fringe beliefs, but it was through the internet that they linked up with similarly delusional people; a feedback loop of insanity. Bugonia is a film about people who cannot accept that the source of so much suffering in our world is human cruelty and instead fall back on increasingly incoherent explanations.