Best of 2025

Quite at the last minute, I’m keeping my tradition to compile a list of some of my favorite media items I’ve enjoyed in the last 12 months.

This year, for the first time, I’m not awarding some categories (best song, best album, best book) as I don’t feel anything stood out particularly, or maybe I just didn’t have the time to enjoy those things enough. And as always, no affiliate links: this is mostly for myself, to look back and rediscover things in a few years, but maybe you can pick up some interesting stuff you might have missed.

Best movie: A House of Dynamite; runner up, The Life of Chuck. Both are wonderful movies, and they couldn’t be more different from each other.

Best TV show: Andor; runner up The Last of Us. Funny, two second seasons that in some ways surpassed the first ones; not funny how depressing both are, but again very good and recommended.

Best podcast: Criminal - Guns, Grenades, and $100.000.

Best article I read: Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop?… and no, Milla did not care one bit when I got her one.

Best Mac app: CrossOver for enabling me to play some pretty amazing games on my Mac; I thought of awarding Windsurf, which was a pretty transformative tool for me this year, but a. it’s just a VSCode fork and there’s no way I’d celebrate a non-native app, plus b. there’s nothing particularly unique about it, clearly AI-powered IDEs are here to stay, but I’m not sure this one in particular will be the winner in the long run.

Best iOS app: Once again, Shortcuts, for unlocking amazing automations. Runner up(s): Drafts and OmniFocus, because without them I would not function.

Best videogame: This is a hard one: in the last week I’ve been putting a lot of hours in Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and it’s clearly a masterpiece, deep, challenging and with amazing (mind blowing, really) graphics, but it’s really fresh in my mind and incredibly exciting. So I’ll suspend my judgement until I’ve completed it, and will award it in 2026. Which means that 2025 goes to Red Dead Redemption 2, which might be a few years old, but I’ve only played this year and remains the most vast and compelling videogame world I’ve ever experienced, and I don’t even like western movies.

Best video: What a gloomy year! I was scrolling my YouTube likes of the year and it’s so tainted by the disgrace leading America that I really struggled to find something inspiring, so I’ll finish things up by letting you have a laugh at this ad from a few years ago which I only discovered in 2025, because the Internet let me down.

From me and Milla, a heartfelt wish for the Happiest and most serene 2026! 🥂