For me, the new year doesn’t begin until Steven Soderbergh publishes his annual Seen, Read list. The Oscar-winning filmmaker has long been one of my artistic heroes, from sex, lies, and videotape (1989) through last year’s spiky drama of marriage and espionage, Black Bag. A relentless curiosity marks his career as he experiments with new ways of telling stories in terms of form, technology, and distribution.1 His Seen, Read list is exactly what it sounds like, a compendium of every film, TV show, play, and book he’s consumed over the past twelve months. It’s always a fascinating, bracingly honest document. Soderbergh cops to watching plenty of true crime and is hooked on the Bravo reality series Below Deck. (He has said he’s a fan because “It’s about work.”) I’m always intrigued by the movies he chooses to screen more than once; in 2025, it was Three Days of the Condor (1975). As he releases each new film, you can look back and discover what may have helped shape it. On occasion, it’s even possible to unearth a tidbit of Hollywood news. A while back, people observed how many Star Wars movies cropped up on the list. In October 2025, it emerged that Soderbergh had been enlisted by his Logan Lucky (2017) collaborator Adam Driver to work on a since-scuppered Ben Solo film. I have not kept up with the franchise, but that’s one Star Wars movie I definitely would have seen.
And when I did, I would have written it in my desk calendar. I keep track of such information, too, and have done for decades. As soon as I finish a book or movie, I scribble the essentials down. What then happens to this vital data? Nothing. I eventually toss the calendar, and the list of titles goes with it. Making me wonder why I bother in the first place.
Inspired by Soderbergh’s latest compilation, I decided to release my own version this year. Mine would look a little different. Soderbergh logs all the sports he watches; were I to do that, I’d write BASEBALL every day from the start of spring training to the end of the World Series.2 And I only count a TV series if I watch a season in its entirety; I don’t care to leave a digital trail of every show where I sampled the pilot and thought, “Nah,” or, even worse, ones where I made it through five or more episodes only to realize, “I don’t care what happens to these characters.” There are more of those than I want to admit. But I’ll also cheerfully plead guilty to mainlining all eighteen episodes of the deranged Doctor Odyssey (RIP).
I put in the time on this project. I looked up release and publication dates. I noted the lengthy subtitle of every nonfiction book to provide context. I pulled together a list that was through and accurate, and it took so much longer than I expected.
When I finally finished and settled in to watch a movie that would be dutifully entered into my 2026 calendar, a thought struck me with force: Don’t publish this.
Why? Because nobody would care. I’d just spent hours creating a solo version of Letterboxd. Whenever people post links to their Letterboxd accounts, I never click through. There’s no reason to inflict this minutia on anyone else. I’m not a movie critic or a working filmmaker like Soderbergh. If there are patterns or secrets to be divined from my media diet, I’d prefer to keep that intel to myself. About all you could discern from my list is the approximate date Chris Elford and I signed the contract for A Hell of a Drink, because of the spike in horror movies and related reading.
Still, a rough analysis of the numbers—
In 2025, I saw 203 movies and read 87 books. I have seen and read more in other years. A Hell of a Drink skewed both totals.
The strangest double bill took place on May 16, when I watched Riefenstahl and Paddington in Peru (both US 2025). Even funnier: that was our wedding anniversary.
Of the 203 movies, I saw 42 of them in the theater. That’s up since the end of the pandemic, but nowhere near what it used to be.
Many of those 42 films were archival presentations. I intend to maintain that trend; one of my first 2026 forays was to a 4K restoration of Ikarie XB-1 (1963), a Czechoslovakian adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem story that influenced the production design of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and features a sequence that plays like a rough draft of Alien (1979).3
Back in the dark ages of blogging, I’d post top ten lists. I’m not about to revive the practice, but all those hours of toil should yield something. So here are five favorite films from 2025: Eephus, No Other Choice, The Secret Agent, Blue Moon, and Presence. That last entry was directed by—guess who—Steven Soderbergh.
What I’m Reading
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is among our best longform journalists. Her latest New York Times essay, in which she attempts to make sense of the devotion to the new Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat that has led her to see the show thirteen times (if not more by now), hit me hard. It says so much about life, growing older, and what we want from art. A choice excerpt:
Because outside that theater, there is a flatness — an anhedonic quality that, yes, is associated with aging and maybe even with depression too, but it’s also associated with the state of the culture these days, a new culture that asks nothing of us but instead meets us where we are, which is on our phones and not interested in surprise or new emotion.
What I’m Drinking
Work continues apace on A Hell of a Drink. Chris road-tested the below concoction last week, and I showed up to do my part by sampling the entire glass pictured.
To answer your questions: 1) Yes, all of these ingredients are in one cocktail. 2) Yes, it tastes amazing. 3) No, I won’t reveal which horror movie inspired it—that’s what the book, coming in 2027, is for—but some of you can probably guess. All the clues are there.
I’ll have some fun news to reveal regarding Mr./Dr. Soderbergh later this year.
This is not an exaggeration. I should seek either medical help or a front office job in the league.
I heartily endorse Ikarie XB-1 because it depicts the first interstellar voyage to bring a full complement of martini glasses.
Nice to know someone else out there likes Marmite. :)
I also enjoy your reviews.
I’ve been keeping lists of movies, television episodes, and books since 2003. I don’t throw them away at the end of the year. I keep them in Excel and move them to a Dropbox folder at the end of the year. And then hardly ever look at them again.