The 2025 Satyrs’ Forest Horny Awards™

I get the sense that i have, by accident, developed a highly skewed sense of who Darren Aronofsky is as a filmmaker. He is known as a master of the miserable, a director for whom the top review on Letterboxd is always “this was great and i’m going to kill myself”. Unfortunately for everyone else, my only experiences with him so far have been π and Caught Stealing, and i’m having a fucking wonderful time.

Like π, this film takes full advantage of its New York setting, as our lead, the alcoholic baseball could-have-been Hank Thompson (played by the always brilliant Austin Butler, fresh off of Elvis) is caught in the crosshairs of at least three different cosmopolitan criminal gangs. Despite the grit and the dour lives of everyone involved, there’s a real joie de vivre here, a clear love for the city and its people that oozes through from the subway-themed opening credits to the last sight of LaGuardia. (If Carol Kane isn’t nominated for anything over her bit part as the Yiddish-speaking mother of two frum gangsters, the world’s officially gone to shit.)

A lot of people seem to have been put off of this by the fact that the trailers sold it as a full-blown comedy, or Mr Aronofsky’s sombre reputation — but leave your preconceptions at the door, and i promise you that Caught Stealing will reward you with a great time. (Just for the record: the cat lives.)

Honourable mentions

• 
  One Battle After Another

  Destined for a long, prosperous future as an afternoon Dad Movie. I wish Benicio del Toro was my sensei.

• 
  Marty Supreme

  Timothée Chalamet may be our generation’s only true movie star. Thank god for Prozac.

• 
  Bugonia

  Is it just me, or is Jesse Plemons turning into Philip Seymour Hoff­man as he ages?

• 
  28 Years Later

  Every time a North East location showed up i did a soyjak point at the screen. I’m sorry.

What happens when we, as a society, are no longer able to distinguish reality from fiction? It’s an ever more pressing question in this age of deepfakes and dripped-out Popes, and if you believe John Carpenter’s prescient In the Mouth of Madness, it’s not going to be pretty.

This is a weird movie, make no mistake, and I can absolutely see why critics in the nineties were puzzled by it. It is self-serious even when what is happening is patently absurd, and when Julie Carmen was rattling off exposition like a harried nineteen-fifties newsreader, i did briefly think: oh, god, am i watching Mant!? But the things that make it wobbly are what make it wonderful, and it wouldn’t be what it is without that patent absurdity, the sort of thing that allows it to successfully jump-scare the viewer with nothing but the colour blue.

Robert Eggers hits it out of the park again with a centenary reboot of F. W. Murnau’s copyright-dodging masterpiece. I had to suppress myself from cheering when Willem Dafoe showed up — i had somehow forgotten his presence in the marketing, and his appearance in a film will always net it an extra star out of ten on the scales — but the whole ensemble is phenomenal. Bill Skarsgård’s porno ’stache is a makeup decision for the ages.

I guess i don’t really know what i expected from a film literally about beating a dead horse, but for all that the trailers made it seem like a rollicking, Evil Dead–style bonkers horror-comedy, the bulk of this is taken up by a plodding retread of “DAE rich people are stupid??” satire already milked dry by the far superior Glass Onion and The Menu. What a waste of a phenomenal premise. At least the creature design is cool.

The vibes around The Computer have been deteriorating for some time, so in an age of widespread technopessimism i was overjoyed to listen to an album that so unabashedly celebrates the connective power of the internet. This jaunty Porter Robinson–esque electropop should be mandatory listening for anyone else who also, despite it all, still loves their computer.

→ Listen to “iPod Touch”

Jesus Christ, how did i let The Downward Spiral elude me for so long? This is an absolutely titanic record — there’s no way to listen to it without instinctively reaching for the volume knob, turning it as far up as it’ll go, and hoping the neighbours don’t put your head on a pike for it. Getting your ears fucked by abrasive industrial noise never felt so good.

It’s funny how, out of context, “Closer” is the sexiest song ever written — but then you listen to the album in full, and when it comes up, you’re just like, Oh. Oh, dear. This man is really not well. The sign of a good concept album, i suppose. And, even after being utterly displaced by Johnny Cash’s (incredible) cover, “Hurt” can still punch a hole right through my heart with a simple whisper of, “You are someone else… I am still right here.”

→ Listen to “March of the Pigs”

I’m not usually the type for triple-A games — too expensive, too samey, too drab, too mój-komputer-kurwa-eksploduje — but i bought Control on sale on a whim because its setting had always appealed to me, and: my god, this is how the other half has been living all this time? What else have i been missing out on?

There is little i find more beautiful in this world than the human urge to remix: to see someone’s work, take it, and go, “That gives me an idea…”

Telephone is a celebration of that spirit through the medium of hypertext: a vast web of artistic Chinese whispers, spreading out from one work into hundreds of interpretations made by artists in different mediums from around the globe. This is, apparently, its third iteration, and let us all hold out hope that there may be a fourth.

→ Visit telephonegame.art

2009 Youtube is back… in Pog form! Tor Parsons’ utterly sincere public-access-style show put the smile back on my face in a way i hadn’t known since early Vsauce. I just love hearing about weird historical stories, man. (I never thought the Nation of Islam would make me want a tamale so badly…)

→ Watch the video

By all accounts this should be slop. Every dictionary has done slop, everybody won’t shut up about slop, and you just can’t avoid slop. But i refuse. Firstly, because it feels abhorrent in the mouth — the “moist” of the twenty-twenties. And secondly, it’s not even from 2025! I can easily find messages from my friends using slop in the appropriate context from mid-2024. So instead, i have decided to go for something we know for sure was coined in the past year:

vibe code
v. To develop software by means of prompting a machine-learning system, rather than manually writing code.
“Dave vibe coded our production database and now we’ve had five security breaches in the past hour.”

It seems likely enough to stick around, though as always, technology has a funny way of advancing both faster and slower than anyone could expect. Maybe in 2027 the computers won’t even bother asking us what we want to program.

I feel a little bad about this, because i’ve been to the Rijksmuseum before and it wasn’t at all new to me, but of all the places i went while back in the Netherlands, nothing sticks out more clearly in my mind than that great treasury of art. Where else can you see a condom and a Van Gogh proudly displayed in the same hallowed halls?

There’s still every chance this might blow up in my face (hence the asterisks), but, though i was too inconfident to give the fall of the Assadid régime the award last year, it seems that a free, peaceful Syria might just be here to stay. After fourteen years, six hundred thousand dead, and six million displaced, the cradle of civilisation can finally recover. My fingers are chafing crossed that nobody decides to fuck it up.