The year in TV (2025)

2025 felt like a particularly good year for television. I sit down every Tuesday and Saturday with my wife to watch whatever our chosen show at the moment is (we’ll have a “Tuesday show” and a “Saturday show”—Saturday usually allows us to get two or three episodes in, while Tuesday is better for shows we want to digest a little more slowly) and there were definitely parts of the year where we were spoilt for choice.

https://justincawthorne.com/2026/01/26/the-year-in-tv-2025/

The year in books (2025)

Last year I read 33 books (including a few graphic novels and short stories). Given it wasn’t too many years back that I was struggling to get myself back into a healthy reading habit I’m pretty happy with that statistic. While 2024 was the year that I plunged into folk horror, last year seemed to be the year that I discovered an appetite for autobiographies with three such books ending up among my favourite reads of the year.

https://justincawthorne.com/2026/01/25/the-year-in-books-2025/

The year in film (2025)

I watched over 130 films in 2025, which is not bad going at all. Some of those were new films, some were rewatches, and some were films I was long overdue watching for the first time. It takes discipline and careful planning to get through this much time sitting on the sofa, so I have a weekly film viewing routine going which runs more or less as follows:

https://justincawthorne.com/2026/01/15/the-year-in-film-2025/

Top … 14(?) films of … 1983

It’s the year that I turned 12 and the year that the internet was born, at least in a purely technical sense. The first mobile phone call was also made and there was a huge ‘video game crash’ which triggered the end of Atari and was partly caused by the rise in home computing (this is the same crash that, legendarily, saw thousands of ET game cartridges buried in a New Mexico desert).

https://justincawthorne.com/2025/10/24/top-14-films-of-1983/

So who wants to talk about Alien: Earth ...?

https://justincawthorne.com/2025/10/10/alien-earth-a-review-sort-of/

Top 10 Films of … 1982

1982. I hit my eleventh year. This one always feels to me like the year that pop culture really started happening. In truth it had been on the boil for a while, but with E.T. dominating cinemas, Michael Jackon’s Thriller storming the charts, and the debut of the CD this was a year of huge tentpoles for consumers to latch onto (or to be fed with until they burst).

https://justincawthorne.com/2025/09/05/top-10-films-of-1982/

The latest entry in my slow but relentless series looking at the biggest and best films from each since the one I was born in. This week: 1981!

https://justincawthorne.com/2025/07/22/top-10-so-close-films-of-1981/