RecDek's Year in Review!

IT’S CHRISTMASSSSSSSSSSSS! Doesn’t today feel like proper school holidays vibes. WHICH I LOVE. Like, are you doing work or pretending to do work from home with your feet up, a dozing dog on the rug, whilst you drink wine in front of a crackling fire?

Now, we have some serious news items on ye olde yuletide agenda today. Namely: The Oscars, Dereck and our picks of the year.

LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING

Ali Cook’s short film, The Pearl Comb, which we showcased at RecDek House London, has only gone and been Oscar Shortlisted! This is insane. The odds! The effort this takes is outstanding and incredible news. Gargantuan congratulations to Ali and the whole team. Click the poster below to checkout the trailer! Now on to Oscar glory!

NEXT UP… We need to talk about Dereck (he’s only allowed 500 friends).

Also occasionally known as “Dezza”, Dereck is the latest addition to the RecDek family, “fam”. After much gentle persistent persuasion I’ve persuaded him to be your personal what-to-watch assistant this Christmas, and literally forever after, if you want. So you can chat to him anytime, about what you’re in the mood for.

He’s been quite insistent that he only wants 500 friends for now (super specific like that is Dereck). So if you’ve also been pulling your wires out about how long it takes to find something to watch, this Christmas save yourself the doom scroll, Dereck will provide suggestions anytime.

And, get this, Dereck is extra EXTRA EXTRA useful once he’s connected to your RecDek account for many a reason, that’s really where the magic happens.

So to be one of the first to chat to Dereck, tap the link below. You’ll need to have WhatsApp because Dereck is worryingly addicted to WhatsApp and only uses WhatsApp. You should see his phone: only WhatsApp.

Feel free to tell your friends too, but once he hits 500 mates, that’ll be it, for now.

NEXT UP… 2025 IN REVIEW

Someone asked me the other day what my favourite films of the year have been. I thought “I should do a year in review for the newsletter for anyone looking to watch something during the holidays, ‘tis the season etc”. Here goes nothing.

The Year In Film - My Picks

Something shifted this year. Across genres, budgets, and auteurs, the same question kept surfacing: what happens when ambition wins but human connection loses out?

Skarsgård in Sentimental Value. Mescal in Hamnet. Chalamet in Marty Supreme. Each playing men who chased something so hard they forgot to look around. The films don’t finger-wag, they're genuinely curious about the trade-offs we make, the stories we tell ourselves about temporary sacrifices that somehow become permanent. Ambition.

Many of these characters are artists. Sportsmen, filmmakers, playwrights, performers. People whose work requires disappearing into worlds, and who sometimes forget to come back. There's something honest about cinema examining its own pathology.

The crop extends further: PTA, del Toro, Safdie, Cianfrance, Cooper, Reichardt, Anderson. All circling similar territory. Strivers. Providers. Dreamers. People who built something impressive and hollowed out something essential in the process.

But what I loved is that these aren't punishment narratives. They're repair narratives. Tentative, awkward, incomplete. Characters catching glimpses of what they missed and wondering if there's still time.

Trier said it at Cannes: "Tenderness is the new punk." In a cultural moment drowning in performed strength, cinema went the other direction. Vulnerability as plot. Presence as resolution.

Not every film focused on it, of course. But the collective intent felt unmistakable. Hollywood processing something real.

But let’s not forget about television, which continued to addict us to the sofa! Stranger Things, Severance, Louis Theroux, Celebrity Traitors, Blue Lights. And on.

So…

Here’s a run down of the films I rated this year. This is not any sort of definitive list. We’ll still be friends if you disagree.

Add these to your RecDek Watchlist this Christmas. Or tell us what you thought yourself on the app. We’re here for you (we hear for you) making sure you and your mates watch some epic entertainment.

Train Dreams – A gorgeously melancholy reflection on a bygone era. Clint Bentley adapts Denis Johnson's novella following Robert Grainier across decades in the early 20th-century American West: a logger and railroad worker building a life, then surviving the afterlife of what he's lost. Joel Edgerton gives Robert quiet giant presence, stoic but never blank, while Felicity Jones is luminous as the love that becomes memory. Kerry Condon, Clifton Collins Jr., and William H. Macy arrive like vivid weather systems. Adolpho Veloso's cinematography is breathtaking, the natural world filmed with Malick-ian awe, and Bryce Dessner's score is beautiful. Robert witnesses an Asian man pulled off the job and killed over an unproven accusation, workers acting as judge, jury, executioner, while he can only protest. Exquisite, sad, quietly furious. Really about ghosts: the ones you loved, the ones you lost, and the ones you didn't save.

It Was Just an Accident - Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025, Jafar Panahi's thriller is a masterful allegory for the horrific relationship between the people of Iran and the authoritarian regime controlling them for decades. When former political prisoners capture the officer who tortured them, a moral quandary ensues. Panahi's brilliance lies in how he delicately unfurls all aspects as tension mounts. Throw in one of the decade's best endings, and you'll immediately appreciate how Panahi continues crafting the most politically relevant cinema of this era.

Marty Supreme - New York in the 1950s, but the real period detail is perspiration-sweaty ambition leaking through every pore. Josh Safdie follows Marty Mauser, a rising table-tennis hustler chasing greatness like oxygen. Timothée Chalamet plays him as a beautiful, panicked engine: all flash, bravado, and exposed nerve, a grifter who wants the dream so badly he becomes the pitch. The rush comes from relentlessness, schemes stacking on schemes, scenes snapping like adrenaline, yet the sting is what it costs: relationships as transactions, intimacy postponed, a life built on motion because stopping would mean hearing the emptiness. Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary, Abel Ferrara form a carousel of enablers and marks, each reflecting the same American sickness: believing wanting something hard enough means deserving it. Shot on 35mm by Darius Khondji with Daniel Lopatin's buzzing score, it's a non-stop thrill ride that treats Marty's willpower like an art form, ferocious self-invention refusing to apologise for wanting more.

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell's novel adapted by Chloe Zhao, imagining William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) in the English countryside, miles from London where the playwright's following grows. At the heart: their children, including the title character who'll inspire one of the greatest plays ever written. Buckley delivers a generational performance in Zhao's visceral, emotional masterpiece that lingers for hours afterward.

One Battle After Another - The past doesn't knock, it kicks the door off its hinges. PTA's comedic action-thriller follows Leonardo DiCaprio as a burnout ex-revolutionary raising a child while old enemies crawl back into frame. The strangest sting is oddly romantic: both Bob and Lockjaw (Sean Penn) broken by Perfidia's (Teyana Taylor) rejection, everyone stumbling through consequences like fallout. The stopped production for 2 months so Benicio del Toro could join the cast, a scene-stealing miracle, magnetic, soulful, hilarious. Penn is deliciously absurd as a deeply insecure psychopath whose menace is rooted in neediness. Shot by Michael Bauman and scored by Jonny Greenwood, even the action has a thesis: a car chase that doesn't get faster, it gets queasier, reinventing the form through vertiginous tension. When Tom Petty's "American Girl" hits, the classic gets rewired into grief. Ocean waves, baby, ocean waves.

AND NEARLY FINALLY…

Wanna activate your brand or project at the last Sundance Park City?

January will mark Sundance’s final year at Park City. RecDek House will be in town! If you’re interested to partner with us at the last Park City Sundance, give us a shout by filling in this form:

Partner form X RecDek House X Sundance 2026 X goooooood times

AND FINALLY

That just leaves me to wish you a wonderful holiday. It’s been a real year here at RecDek, we’re all about independent entertainment discovery. Tell your friends.

We’ll see you in 2026.

Happy Christmas.

Ed