This is the season in which I start watching films I wouldn’t otherwise even think of seeing, trying to catch up with Best Picture Oscar Nominees. Sometimes that leads to great discoveries, sometimes I know in advance they are not the films for me. At least this year I don’t have to pay an overpriced ticket to sit through three hours of Avatar (sorry if you are a fan).

This morning, on my Mac, I accidentally opened the Weather widget sitting on my desktop - something I never do. It usually shows the weather in my hometown; this morning, it decided I was more interested in Oslo (-8°C, by the way).

This week I completed one more revolution around the Sun, and although it was far from perfect (I couldn’t take my usual day off), I had a nice present from Nia DaCosta and Alex Garland.

This post is about what is probably a very niche issue, but I’ll publish it anyway, at least for my future reference.

I started the year in Paris, at a place called ‘Hotel Paradiso’. To Italian speakers, it means ‘heaven hotel’, but, for everyone else, the name could be reminiscent of (Nuovo) Cinema Paradiso, the Oscar-winning film by Giuseppe Tornatore about a young boy being initiated to the magic of the big screen. I think that was also the intention of the hotel’s owners (who may be the French film distributor Mk2, I’m not sure), because the main selling point of the place is having a screen and projector in every room, and subscription to major streaming platforms included (except for Disney+).

Like I did for 2024, I’ll complete my summary of 2025 with one last post (possibly with a single exception) about the films I have watched during the year.