Flasz On Film

This is it! 2025 in Review concludes with this entry where I trawled through everything I wrote in 2025 to choose a selection I’d happily include in my portfolio, if anyone ever asked me to compose one. As far as I can tell, this entire place is my giant portfolio already so I don’t know what to tell you. In any case, in 2025 I pressed “publish” a grand total of 139 times, so technically speaking, the ten pieces I chose as my own personal highlight reel amount to just over 7% of the lot. Still, I decided to curate this list the way that I did because every single one of these entries meant something to me, offered an interesting challenge or became a vessel for a small shard of my personality. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I loved writing them!

INDEPENDENCE DAY Movies as Nostradamian Prophecies of Trumpist Dystopia

One of my pet subjects to which I tend to come back every so often is the subject of looking at big populist spectacles and trying to find something in them. I’ve found gauche readings in Airport 1975, 2012 and Transformers movies and this time I located one in Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day films. It felt particularly timely and fitting because Trump had just taken office a few days before and probably this might be the reason why at some point in the future I might be denied entry to the Home of the Brave, but I found this piece indispensable to my journey as a writer. In fact, it may have helped to ignite a desire to embark on a whole new writing project that I am not ready to talk about just yet. (Full article here)

On the Demise of “Actually” Movies Under Algorithmic Pressure

The idea to write about the subject of serendipity in movie-watching and how the concept of a movie you actually liked essentially in defiance of expectations has gone extinct popped into my head while podcasting about Red Rock West. As is the case with many articles that I have written in the past, it brewed in the back of my head and then ended up being worked out in real time as I was writing, but I nevertheless emerged very happy with myself, as I touched on a handful of ideas I hold as important. (Full article here)

CONGO at 30: The Epitome of 90s-Style So-Cheesy-It’s-Awesome Cinema

For as long as I can remember I have been a fan of Frank Marshall’s Congo, which I have continuously held as an underrated cult classic. Therefore, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write what exactly makes this movie special and why the criticism towards it is oftentimes mean-spirited and guided by the viewer’s inability to find resonance with this kind of 90s camp fun. I hope I did this movie justice as I traced its history, recounted the many ways in which Congo has been turned into a meme and delineated exactly how anyone should have fun with this classic. (Full article here)

The McMurphy-Ratched Reversal

This was another example of what I sometimes refer to internally as “chain reaction” where an article germinated in my mind as a result of a conversation I had while podcasting about a movie. This time, we spent nearly three hours discussing the many facets of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and I ended up defending what clearly is a contrarian position. Stipulating that Nurse Ratched is only the villain in this book because we naturally gravitate to identify with McMurphy’s perspective is not something you’d read anywhere, as far as I could tell. Yet, I thought about it a little and produced this piece as a result, in which not only did I try to reframe McMurphy as an agent of chaos driven by purely selfish motivations but that the real perceived villain is poorly developed state of medical sciences. (Full article here)

Art the Clown and the Death of the Slasher Icon

This year I finally caught up with the widely popular cult slasher series The Terrifier, if only to check if off my list and I found myself unsettled by it in ways I never expected. Perhaps I found myself in a minority of viewers who enjoy slashers but somehow failed to see the appeal of this series, especially its main icon Art the Clown. I ruminated on this for a little bit and tried to identify exactly what makes Art the Clown such an enduring presence, what it says about our culture and the direction of travel for the genre as a whole, specifically in the context of the outright mean-spirited attitude this series has adopted in place of more familiar playfulness. I don’t want to say that my article ruffled some feathers, though it probably could have, but I think it also paired up nicely with another piece I wrote this year highlighted below. (Full article here)

Pornification of Mainstream Horror

The topic of what I termed “pornification” of the horror genre has been on my mind for a while now and I was super glad to put it into words. I think that as far as craft goes, this piece is an example of my improved discipline and focus, even though it was still assembled mostly as a stream-of-thought. Fun fact: that’s just how I write. Most of the work I ever publish is only slightly removed from being a polished first draft and the words you follow represent my thinking process. Anyway, having watched Bring Her Back, which is a challenging movie for those faint of heart and with a second-rate stomach, The chain of thought has finally materialized for me and I was able to produce this piece where I identified that the way horror movies have progressed throughout recent years may be response to viewers’ progressive desensitization to violence and gore. (Full article here)

Colonoscopy: On the Rampant and Unyielding Colonization of Movie Titles

Although this looked superficially as an excuse to find a whole bunch of ways to use the word “colon” in a sentence, the idea of exploring how the titling conventions in movies have shifted in recent years was way more important to me. And it was also fun to research, as in anticipation of writing this article I did spend a non-negligible amount of time collecting data to show if I was right or not. And I was right, by the way. I had so much fun digging into this subject, finding out how likely a movie is to adopt a “colonified” subtitle depending on its place in the franchise and how the idea of using subtitles have become a smoke screen to hide the lack of originality in the blockbuster space. (Full article here)

King’s Backdoor Fantasy and the Paradoxical Requirements for Successfully Adapting THE STAND

I have written a lot about Stephen King this year and I thought I needed to bring at least one of these pieces to this list. I chose to highlight my writing on The Stand in which I argue, hopefully with at least a modicum of originality of thought, that adapting King’s massive opus of fantasy is an incredibly difficult task for a number of reasons. It is a rather unique work of fantasy where supernatural elements slowly creep into the narrative and turn a pandemic novel into a post-apocalyptic piece and then into a biblically-slanted work of modern fantasy. And not only was it impossible for anyone to grapple with this complexity, but the idea of adapting this book in a way that would translate it well would come with serious challenges for filmmakers brave enough to try. (Full article here)

JAWS at 50: An Entertainment Singularity and a Cosmological Spectacle

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws turned fifty this year. Because it has consistently remained one of my all-time favorite movies, only recently dethroned by John Cassavetes and his A Woman Under the Influence, I wanted to write something to celebrate this occasion. And even though I have already written about Jaws before, this is a movie I find incredibly difficult to discuss because it has been analyzed from all possible angles and finding a way that felt fresh, personal and worthy of readers’ time constitutes a major challenge. Difficult as it is to toot my own horn, I believe I rose to the occasion and produced a review-adjacent essay that offers an unusual perspective on the movie itself and the unique skillset of young Spielberg who helmed its production. Of all the anniversary pieces I penned in 2025, this one felt particularly special. (Full article here)

SHOWING UP and Letting Go

Finally, I’d like to shine some light on this little article that looks like a review of Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, but in reality it is far more personal than anything I wrote in 2025. Granted, I frequently leave pieces of myself in my work, but occasionally I would sit down and engage in what I think is “therapy through writing” where a movie-related topic serves as a springboard for me to work through something difficult. I’ve written about fatherhood and childhood traumas before, and this time Kelly Reichardt’s movie connected with me so profoundly because of turmoil I went through last year. Every single word typed into this article meant a lot to me and it hurt so much for me to put myself in such a vulnerable position. But it was something I needed to get off my chest and remains the single piece of writing I am most proud of finishing in 2025. (Full article here)