In 2025 I tried to watch and read less US media. This isn’t a definitive list, just the books and movies that followed me out of the room.

Books

I read a lot of quiet, plot-light fiction this year. Books that care more about mood, memory, and voice than big events.

Ballerina by Patrick Modiano

Set in 1960s Paris, Ballerina follows a single mother’s troubled relationship with her young son, and her enigmatic involvement with the narrator.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

An Italian expat couple in Berlin: freelancers with few constraints, tending houseplants and curating a life online while the city hums around them.

I’m a Fool for Loving You by Camila Sosa Villada

Nine short stories about desire, danger, tenderness, and survival—sharp, funny, and devastating.

It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth

by Zoe Thorogood

A brutally honest (and often darkly funny) graphic memoir about living with bipolar disorder and trying to keep making things anyway.

Land of Mirrors by María Medem

A stunning, dreamlike graphic novel—mythic and intimate at the same time, with art that feels like it’s humming.

Movies

I watched fewer big movies and more films that feel like postcards: compact, precise, and a little haunted. The ones below are mostly about image and rhythm.

Can I Get a Witness?

A near-future moral fable with a quiet dread running under everything. It’s the kind of film where the premise is simple and the aftertaste is not.

La Jetée

A whole science-fiction epic told in still images. Time travel as memory, obsession, and inevitability. Short, perfect, and strangely emotional.

The Red Turtle

Nearly wordless, completely gorgeous. A story about solitude, companionship, and the long shape of a life, told with ocean rhythm.

Mars Express

A sleek, French cyberpunk noir: a PI and her android partner chasing a missing person case that keeps widening into something systemic.