While there were enough great films in 2025 that got universal acclaim, these three deserved more.
Anniversary (2025) dir. by Jan Komasa
I have already written a full review of this, but I would like to stress once again that Anniversary by the Polish director behind Corpus Christi is one of the most unjustly ignored films of 2025. Due to its explosive content (prescient, horrific), the film received next to no publicity. A shame, really, because this dystopian story of American future (present?) is frankly devastating.
Yes, there are certain problems here (mainly with the tone which is a little patchy), but overall this produces one hell of an impression. And again, I admire Komasa's guts for going to the US and doing this. Also, I don't think it is physically possible to hate anyone more than you will hate Dylan O'Brien while watching this film.
Blue Moon (2025) dir. by Richard Linklater
The most surprising thing about this film is that it is not, in fact, a play. Blue Moon looks very much like something you would see in a theatre. Basically, the whole film revolves around one evening in a bar, a few characters and a heartbreaking unraveling of one man. Ethan Hawke plays Lorenz Hart, the famous lyricist who made up one part of the legendary Rodgers-Hart songwriting duo. It is early spring in 1943, and Hart is there to meet his songwriting partner who is currently working with a different lyricist (Oscar Hammerstein II) and who is about to celebrate the great success of his new musical Oklahoma!
A talkative, foul-mouthed Hart is willing to speak to anyone who wouldn't mind listening. A barman, a journalist, a guy who delivers flowers, a girl he thinks is in love with him, a young aspiring pianist playing nearby. There is a lot of bitterness here, and false hopes, and failed romance, and love for art and music. The conversations with Rodgers (played by Andrew Scott), when we get to them, are painful and revealing, but a certain hope is always there. You want him to succeed, against all odds. He is the man, after all, who wrote the lyrics of "My Funny Valentine". A powerful little film, and Ethan Hawke deserves every award for this performance.
Hallow Road (2025) dir. by Babak Anvari
Again, a somewhat subdued, almost intimate piece that was overshadowed by much flashier films in 2025. But I loved this to bits. Hallow Road is a psychological thriller that manages to mess up with your mind in a very creative manner (watch the end credits).
A couple (played by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) receive a distressed phone call from their daughter with whom they had just had an awful row. Apparently, she got into a terrible car accident and needs their help. We do not even get to see the young woman, just hear her voice. Naturally, Pike's and Rhys's characters drive through the night to save her, and all kinds of bizarre things come to light on their way.
Hallow Road is just 80 minutes long, and it is so fucking tense it won't let you relax for one second. Again, a brilliant little film, with quite an ending.
Colour Green is a very deceptive title. After all, there is nothing especially 'green' about this album, whether we are talking about the sepia-imbued cover or the actual musical content. And yet the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. First, the colour in question invokes the cover of Nick Drake's classic debut Five Leaves Left from 1969 (which was surely an inspiration for Colour Green). Second, it creates a certain out-of-sync and out-of-time feeling that is further backed up by the story behind this album's release.
Sibylle Baier is a German folk singer and actress, and yet it is quite hard to say either of those things with full confidence. After all, she recorded but one album, and her only acting credit is a minor appearance in Wim Wenders's Alice In The Cities (1973). Colour Green was recorded in her home in Germany between 1970 and 1973 but remained unknown and unreleased until 30 years later when her son compiled the scattered recordings on a CD and gave it to J Mascis of the American alternative band Dinosaur Jr. J Mascis was so impressed that he passed the songs to the Orange Twin Records label who promptly released them in 2006. Since then, the album has achieved a legendary status and a cult following.
It is a great story, of course, but it wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the music wasn't special. After all, we have heard enough cult albums where the context overshadows the actual music. Colour Green is not one of those albums. Instead, it is a self-contained world of pastoral elegance and melodic brilliance that is sustained all through its brief, but magical, 33 minutes. Colour Green is a world unto itself.
In a nutshell, Colour Green is a haunting guitar-based folk album. It is mostly made up of short ballad-like vignettes which are both evocative and disarmingly beautiful. The material is very even. "Tonight" is the album's most famous tune, but that is perhaps because it comes first. After all, songs like "Remember the Day" and "Forget About" (possibly the most achingly gorgeous thing ever written) are hardly any worse. There is very little variation on the album, although one could argue that "Softly" is almost upbeat and "Wim" is almost playful. Oh and the closing "Give Me a Smile" features an orchestrated string section and an electronic organ (apparently Baier plays a steel-string guitar here instead of a nylon-strung one).
I don't remember who it was who said that February is a Tuesday of the year. Ever since I first heard this album ten or fifteen years ago, I've always felt this was a perfect Tuesday album. "Tonight, as I get back from work...". There is a certain wistfulness to Colour Green, a certain melancholy, but once in a while you encounter beauty that transcends sadness, and gives hope. Colour Green is precisely that.
Manya Wilkinson's Lublin (2024) is yet another addition to my list of perfect little novels. Others include Seize The Day by Saul Bellow, Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov and The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes (the list goes on, obviously). Its perfection lies in the fact that there isn't a breath wasted or a word misplaced. The prose is beautiful and concise, and the emotional range goes from hysterical laughter to tears of despair. Some works of art you savour, not merely read, and Lublin is one of those books.
The plot is fairly simple, and gives off the vibes of an old Jewish fable: three friends embark on a journey to a city none of them have ever been to. This is the very beginning of the 20th century, and the city in question is Lublin (f0r the record, my second favourite Polish city, after Poznan). They don't know much about the place, and have a vague understanding of its location. There is a sense, though, that this city, this mythological metropolis, is the greatest place on Earth. It has the most beautiful girls. The best wine and the best food. It's a place of opportunities where you can make money and fall in love.
Elya is the one with the map. He loves to tell jokes (the jokes are decidedly hit and miss) and has this magical ability to conjure them on the spot and under the most vexing circumstances. Most importantly, he wants to be a businessman and carries a set of brushes that the three friends are planning to sell at the Lublin market. He is the one with the big idea, and he is the one who pushes the whole company forward. The two other friends are Kiva (comes from a rich family, knows all about Adoshem and prays incessantly) and Ziv (Kiva's cousin; hates Russians but likes Dostoevsky, wears bad shoes and will beat you up for fun), and they need to be persuaded all the time that this whole journey is not a complete waste of time.
As you would expect from a good old fable, there are hardships and adventures along the way. Temptations, selflessness, acts of real friendship, betrayal. The backdrop is very vivid, and you never get to forget the time period. 1906. There are despicable crooks along the way, and drunk Russian soldiers. In the meantime, Lublin remains desirable but elusive. Kiva wants to go back home. Ziv wants to get to the Village of Girls (does it even exist?) And even Elya has crises of faith that almost force him to abandon the whole thing and go back home to his girlfriend and sorry family business.
There are two types of book titles, as Martin Amis wrote in the introduction to London Fields. Those that denote things which are already there. And those that are 'present all along', that 'live and breath, or try to, on every page'. Manya Wilkinson's Lublin is a curious case in that it exists between two of those types. Lublin is a little like Beckett's Godot. It is already there, and yet it barely even exists.
The grim realism of Lublin is absolutely harrowing, and yet it is a very elegant, poetic book. I loved these three characters to bits, and was with Elya all the way. I believed him, too, every time he uttered those magical words:
There is a game I sometimes like to play. I ask myself: what if I remove this one song from a given album, will it improve the overall quality? In these dream scenarios, you get In The Court Of The Crimson King without "Moonchild". Led Zeppelin III without "Hats Off To (Roy) Harper". OK Computer minus "Fitter Happier". Would you really argue that those changes do not constitute an improvement? And is there an album in the world that would not get better with some minor pruning (for the record, yes, there is a handful of such albums)?
You might think Ween would be a great candidate for this game. You might think that each one of their albums features a failed experiment or a worthless dick joke that should never have seen the light of day. Oddly enough, Ween renders the game completely irrelevant. Take "Candi" out of Chocolate And Cheese, and some ridiculous yet vital balance is disrupted. Obviously, "Candi" is a silly joke, an uneventful mess, and yet it feels essential to the whole idea of this band. In a way, Ween's heart is spread evenly between "Candi" and, say, "A Tear For Eddie".
Their studio output started with the wild, hilarious screams of "You Fucked Up" and ended with the slick, smart "Your Party", and despite the maddening diversity and the large body or work in between, Ween have always felt like this one clever unit of a band, unbothered by register and willing to take any genre in the world and make it their own. In a live show, they would do "Mister Would You Please Help My Pony" and follow it up with the beautiful, earnest cover of "All Of My Love". There would be no contradiction in that.
Ween are mostly Gene and Dean Ween - the former is a vocalist of a million voices and the latter is one hell of a guitar player.
10. Pure Guava (1992)
This is an early one that features song titles like "Flies On My Dick" and "Touch My Tooter". It sounds that way, too, amateurish and deliberately dumb, besides being their first album for the major label (Elektra). A lot of joke songs and dicking around going on here, and don't even think of making it your first experience of Ween, but when you dig deeper, you will be rewarded with a few flashes of songwriting brilliance ("Little Birdy", "Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy)"). They simply couldn't help themselves.
This sounds a lot like Good Ween Satan: The Oneness, only darker and somehow... even murkier. The crazy thing is that underneath the overall silliness, there is a great band very much enjoying themselves. "Dr. Rock" rocks, "Pork Roll Egg & Cheese" has the sweetest melody in the world and every time Gene Ween screams "Sketches Of Winkle" I can't help thinking about Roger Daltry singing "Pictures Of Lily". I can't say I enjoy listening to The Pod (for the record, the cover is a parody of Leonard Cohen's 1975 compilation), but I find it genuinely unsettling and ever intriguing.
This album greets you with one hell of a warm welcome. After a brief announcement, a few seconds of silence and a brittle drum rhythm, you get Gene Ween shouting "You fucked up, you bitch, you really fucked up!" into your face. What follows is a bunch of one-minute outbursts (plus a couple of 9-minute jams) that tackle various genres and moods. The production values are low, but the fun and the energy levels more than make up for that. Also, there is a song titled "Mushroom Festival In Hell", and it probably sounds like one, too.
This was an interesting detour for the band. After Chocolate And Cheese (which many people consider their best album), the band moved to Nashville to record a country album. Of course, Ween being Ween, they recorded the absolutely greatest pure country album in the world. They brought the edge to it, a few new voices from Gene Ween and almost no dick jokes. Tight, catchy and a lot of fun - with a touch of real heartbreak in the closing ballad "Fluffy".
Back when this album was released, I was already a fan. I remember that for weeks and perhaps months they had been promising a really brown album, and this is what we got. La Cucaracha was, once again, a great exercise in taking a genre (pop punk, piano balladry, smooth jazz, soul, etc.) and writing a song in it. The results were a little patchier than expected ("Spirit Walker" is unforgivably bland, and I have little use for "Learnin' To Love" after 12 Golden Country Greats), and many fans were disappointed, but there is simply too much good material here to ignore. "Woman And Man" is a prog rock epic with some great guitar workout from Dean, "Object" is a lovely folksy ballad with ominous lyrics and "Your Party" creates the sort of atmosphere I could die in.
Shinola: Vol.1 is a superior collection of rarities and outtakes. I'm sure they could release a much longer collection (it is actually criminal that the following volumes have never materialised), but the quality of songs here is up there with Ween's best albums. "Do You See Me" reminds me of prime Pink Floyd. "Monique The Freak" sounds better than anything I've ever heard from Prince. "Someday" would have graced a classic Ween album like Quebec. "Gabrielle", my favourite, is a pumping rocker with a terrific guitar solo and one of their catchiest choruses. Crazily but also typically, early outtakes sound better than the albums they were rejected from.
This is the first major album by the band. A sprawling 16-song album tackling almost every genre in existence and not once sounding faceless or derivative. Somehow, the genius of Ween has always been to own the genres they handle. So if they do sunshine pop ("Roses Are Free"), they do it with utter conviction. If they do a Funkadelic-styled jam ("A Tear For Eddie"), Dean Ween comes up with a Maggot Brain-sized guitar solo. And if it is a revenge tale that you want, done in a spaghetti-western style, then "Buenas Tardes Amigo" will squeeze the absolute maximum out of the obvious genre limitations. It is not a perfect album, but, again, remove the bizarre "Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down)" from the track list, and the whole thing might crumble.
Quebec is one of the band's more serious albums, with its 'brown' moments feeling a little uninspired - if not downright forced. Thus, whereas I can take on "So Many People In The Neighborhood" without any difficulty, I really have no use for "The Fucked Jam" in between the perfect pop of "I Don't Want It" and the moody guitar soundscape "Alcan Road". Still, like I said in the introduction, you can't be a Ween fan and expect them to forego "The Fucked Jam". Quebec is a brilliant album, with heady power pop ("Transdermal Celebration"), propulsive Motorhead-styled hard rock ("It's Gonna Be A Long Night") and the anthemic finale of such magnitude, you could be excused for thinking they may have been entirely serious there. Also, the music of "Zoloft" captures its title perfectly.
What is this - a 12-song Ween album with little to no juvenalia and just great music? But that's what White Pepper really was. A play on the names of two legendary Beatles albums and melodies to match that. The diversity has not gone anywhere, of course, and the Caribbean-styled "Bananas And Blow" just about transcends everything you may have heard in that genre. "Stay Forever" is pop perfection. "Falling Out" is criminally catchy. And the gorgeous "Flutes Of Chi" has one of my favourite guitar solos ever. An absolute classic of an album.
This was the album that made me a fan twenty or so years ago. Unlike most other Ween LPs, The Mollusk always felt to me like a collection of songs all serving one purpose. The Mollusk is not exactly a progressive rock album (there are hints, though), but it sustains the same mood - that of the deep green you can see on the cover - all the way through. Interestingly, they pull it off regardless of the fact that in the course of this album they do foul-mouthed sea shanties, underwater polka and, yes, the obligatory novelty number. A masterful album - so masterful, in fact, that you will be tricked into thinking adult contemporary is not the most worthless genre imaginable. But that is the power of Ween.
