75 Favorite New-To-Me Films of 2025
74 movies 1 tv show
At one point, this list was hovering around 120 movies long - about half of all the movies I watched this year! Try as I might to cut this down to a reasonable number, I just don't have it in me to cut any more.
And I may have cut too many; this was a great year for me watching movies.
(I'd like to give a special shout-out to all of <I>The Trips</I>, though. While I'd watched them all in movie-form over the years, the <b>Criterion Channel</b> had them all in their full, six-episode series-form over the summer; that was my first time watching them that way and so those were also kinda first-time watches in a sense. So to speak. More or less.)
Phase IV (1975) [Movie] Douban IMDb TMDB WikiData
Phase IVDesert ants suddenly form a collective intelligence and begin to wage war on the desert inhabitants. It is up to two scientists and a stray girl they rescue from the ants to destroy them. But the ants have other ideas.
Phase IV is an incredible full length feature film by Saul Bass who is most acclaimed as a graphic designer who's work can be seen as the opening credits from The Seven Year Itch, Vertigo, West Side Story to Alien, Broadcast News and Casino. Phase IV is a much overlooked film that is very much in the style of The Andromeda Strain. What it perhaps lacks in story, it gains in the photography of the millions of ants.
索尔·巴斯,美国动画片绘制家、美工师、导演,1920年5月8日生于纽约市,少年时曾经在布鲁克林学院学习绘画,毕业后从事过十年自由职业设计师的职业,1946年在洛杉矶创立索尔·巴斯合作公司。他在为一些影片进行美术设计时,猜出心裁地为片头片尾的演职人员表配上生动活泼的动画人物,这些动画人物的形态动作巧妙地提示了影片的主题,反映了影片的基调,从而使单调乏味的演职人员表和谐地成为了影片不可或缺的一部分,这种大胆的创新丰富了电影的表现形式,广受观众们的喜爱,其后为不少国家的影片所沿用。索尔·巴斯设计片头片尾的影片以《卡门·琼斯》(1955)、《红衣主教》(1963)等片最为著名。此外,他还监制和导演了很多电视广告片、动画片片和纪录片,如《敏锐的眼光》(1963)、《第四相》(1974)等。