Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2025

Oh dear, it’s April and this post was meant to be up at the end of last year. Not that I’ve done one of these in a while, as I simply haven’t had enough material to fill up all twelve spots in a “best moments of film and television” list since 2023.

In any case, this is exactly what it says on the tin: my twelve favourite scenes, twists, moments or concepts from film or television media that was released in 2025 (though I give myself a little bit of wriggle room and occasionally allow some material from the year before)...

BBC Robin Hood: 39 Episodes Ranked

Ages ago I mentioned doing a comprehensive write-up of the BBC’s Robin Hood, a show that ran from 2006 to 2009, was comprised of thirty-nine episodes in total, and which continues to be something of an albatross around my neck. It was the basis of my very first fandom experience, which involved watching the series unfold on a weekly basis before discussing each episode with others in chatrooms and on LiveJournal, and contributing a few stories to the pool of fanfiction. I made friends in that fandom who I am still in contact with to this day, and it inspired a lot of my own writing, whether it be fanfiction or original work.

That’s not to say it was objectively good. Along with messy storylines, inconsistent characterization and a tiny budget, it also contains one of the most inexplicably terrible creative decisions I’ve ever seen in my life (if you’re familiar with the show, you’ll know what I’m talking about).

That promised write-up is still forthcoming, as it’s very difficult to discuss something dispassionately when you have such strong feelings about it. In the meantime, I’ve recently concluded a rewatch of the show in its entirety with my friend, a first-time viewer. It was fun watching it through a pair of fresh eyes over the course of a year or so, and it inspired me – in lieu of a proper, in-depth review of the show – to rank all thirty-nine episodes.

This was slightly more complicated than it sounds. Sometimes episodes are bad or good not just in themselves, but regarding context – where they’re placed in the show and how positively I feel about what comes before and after them. For instance, many singular episodes are solidly put together but belong in series three, which I dislike on principle. I’d rather watch a weak series one episode (“Dead Man Walking”) that contains my favourite characters than one of the stronger season three episodes (“Do You Love Me?”) in which they’re dead or absent.

Some episodes showcase strong characterization or important plot-points in stories that are narratively all over the place, so what do we rank higher: well-constructed filler episodes (“The Angel of Death”) or tentpole episodes that are complete gibberish (“Let the Games Commence”)? There’s also personal bias when it comes to my favourite characters – I’m naturally going to enjoy the Will/Djaq/Allan-centric episodes more than anything that spotlights Tuck or Kate.

(Then there are those that contain genuinely offensive material like “A Dangerous Deal,” the most misogynistic forty-five minutes of television you’ve ever seen!)

What’s more important: coherent plots or narrative significance or entertainment value? Everyone’s going to have a different opinion, and I can’t pretend I’ve been in any way consistent with how I’ve chosen to rank these episodes. Some are higher because they’re crucial to the overarching storylines, some because they’re fun to watch, some because they’re well-written. Some rank lower despite being all these things because I don’t like the way the characters are treated, or because it’s time-wasting filler, or because they take place in series three.

In other words, I won’t pretend this list isn’t subjective, but it’s my list so I can do whatever I want with it.

The method with which I sorted these episodes was to divide them into five groups of seven, roughly ranging from the best to the worst, and then ranking the entries of each category with more accuracy. As it happens, some of the grading surprised me, certain episodes being higher or lower than I initially assumed they’d be.

So below the cut you’ll find the thirty-nine episodes of the BBC’s Robin Hood, divided into five categories ranked from the absolute worst to the very best, so we can get the negativity out of the way quickly (though just to wrap things up, there’s a bonus category of episodes which are so terrible they defy the ranking system).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 1 Rankings

Life is borderline chaotic at the moment, and even though I’m writing furiously at every possible opportunity, I still feel like this blog is stagnating. To tide you over until my review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s first season, here’s a ranking of all twelve episodes that comprised that season, from worst to best.

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2023

I’ve managed it at last: my final annual end-of-year post. This one was meant to wrap up the year by listing the Twelve Best Moments of Film or Television in 2023, but Covid and full-time work have delayed it until now.

What’s more, 2023 was a difficult year for me in regards to actually finding noteworthy moments to write about, and you’ll discover that the entries on this list often have more to do with “ideas” or “concepts” or “designs” than actual scenes.

The other reason this list may feel a little thin is because I didn’t watch much new stuff this year – I’m sick of starting things only to watch them get cancelled, so 2023 had me seek out entertainment from ten or more years ago, where I could be assured of a beginning, middle and end to any given story. To do otherwise is just a waste of precious time.

Which means that much of what is featured here are from projects released at the tail-end of 2022, though I’ve always allowed myself a bit of wriggle room on what constitutes “the year.” Anything from the nineties is way out, but anything released between 2020 to 2022 passes muster (provided I actually watched it in 2023).

So, here we finally are – the Top Twelve Best Moments of Film or Television in 2023:

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2022

Browsing through my reading/watching logs for 2022, I found myself struck by the fact that this year it was remarkably easy to pull together twelve list-worthy moments featured in film and television, even though few of the things I watched this year really enraptured me. Compare this to 2021, in which I had the exact opposite problem: having to shave the list down to only six entries, but which were comprised of scenes and set-pieces that completely blew me away.

This year’s Fear Street trilogy (by which I mean a project I wasn’t expecting much from, only for it to end up living rent-free in my head for a couple of months) was Andor, the latest entry into Disney’s Star Wars canon, which ended up being so good on so many levels that every other Star Wars project that’s come out of the studio since its acquisition should feel embarrassed.

It also had the side-effect of making other shows, which I probably would have enjoyed just fine otherwise, feel clunky and strained in comparison. House of the Dragon, The Rings of Power, even The Sandman simply did not measure up to the absolute mastery of Andor’s world-building, pacing, dialogue, suspense, and characterization. And unlike the Fear Street trilogy, which does come with my caveat that it’s great for what it is (a YA shlock fest with clever twists and weighty underpinnings), I have no qualms about recommending Andor with the most effusive of praise. It really is that good.

So most of what you’ll find below the cut are impressive scenes within projects that were a tad lacklustre... or at least didn’t engender the powerful response in me that I would have liked. But there was still a lot here to enjoy, much of it based on either grand spectacle or emotional torque, and featuring – as you’d expect – a lot of great female characters.

Here, in no particular order, are my personal top twelve film and television moments from 2022:

Top Six Best Film/Television Moments of 2021

There are not as many “greatest moments” this year (or technically, last year) as I spent most of 2021 catching up on my extensive back catalogue. For whatever reason, I wasn’t watching a lot of brand-new material – more than that, I was trying to cut back on my screen-time anyway. Plus, my attempts to give each month a specific theme certainly limited most of my options.

But a few projects managed to slip through my carefully curated net, and there was some fun stuff to behold. So instead of my usual Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of the Year, here’s the Top Six of 2021...

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments of 2020

Well... that was certainly something. I’ve no idea how to sum up what we just witnessed taking place in America this week, so I’m not going to try.

For all intents and purposes, this is meant to be a pop-culture blog, but even within that limited sphere of interest it was a pretty awful year. The pandemic robbed us of several big-screen releases, J.K. Rowling went full-transphobe on Twitter, and Chadwick Boseman passed away from cancer, a tragedy that shook everyone (especially given his young age) and which casts a pall over the future of the Black Panther franchise.

We also lost Diana Rigg and Max von Sydow (though in those cases you couldn’t say they hadn’t enjoyed long and rewarding lives) and the Black Lives Matter resurgence in May meant that many harrowing accounts of what it’s like to be a Black performer in the entertainment industry emerged.

Of particular interest to me (given the projects they were a part of) were the stories shared by John Boyega, Nicole Beharie and Mehcad Brooks, whose experiences on Star Wars, Sleepy Hollow and Supergirl are eerily similar: all were playing characters that were initially held up as the co-lead of a franchise, each one had romantic chemistry with their white co-star, and all were eventually side-lined in favour of white replacements.

Boyega was reduced to a sidekick, Beharie was written out of the show, and Brooks’s material became so measly that he eventually quit. All three of them have described racial discrimination from both the fandom and in front of the cameras. It’s not a coincidence, it’s a pervasive and insidious pattern that continues to play out whenever racism gets the better of the writers’ room. And the stupidest part? Their marginalization literally hurt the quality of the story itself.

Finally, two cult series came to an end this year, with no small amount of controversy: The 100 and Supernatural each chose to kill off a main character in a remarkably stupid way and go out flipping the bird at devoted long-term shippers, meaning that both shows will certainly live on in infamy, and providing more examples of why writing for Twitter trends is a bad idea, especially if you have no intention of following up on the bait that you dangle.

So yeah, a lot of shit to wade through this year. But for what it’s worth, this annual post is to highlight some of the best on-screen moments of 2020, whether on television or (with safety measures in place, obviously) the big screen...

Top Twelve Best Film/Television Moments in 2019

This is over a month late, but it’s taken that long to summon enough energy to summarize 2019. Here in New Zealand, it was marked by two terrible tragedies: the terrorist attack that claimed fifty-one lives at two mosques, and the eruption of Whakaari on White Island that killed twenty-two people. This isn’t taking into account the injuries both physical, mental and emotional.

But the latter was a natural disaster, the former was man-made, and as many said at the time, it destroyed the innocent of this country. Though it wasn’t our first mass shooting, it was the first that has been so racially motivated and certainly our biggest hate crime.

We’re coming up to the anniversary in March, and though it brought out the best in some (most) people, it also brought to light the unmistakable racism just brewing beneath the surface of our seemingly idyllic culture.

Working at my local library I was approached by an elderly man who opened the conversation with: “there are over a million Muslims in America, isn’t that scary?” which is without contest the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me on so many stupid levels, as well as the elderly woman who complained about how taxpayers were going to pay for the funerals of the victims and the other elderly man who dropped: “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” like it was the most profound fucking thing anyone has ever said (by this time, I was seasoned enough to challenge him on it).

If there is one consolation, it’s that all these people were in their seventies, which means their stupidity and hatefulness will be dead in the ground along with them sooner rather than later (too harsh? Don’t care) but it’s a chilling indictment of what’s really going on in some people’s brains – especially since they were clearly motivated by the attack in their decision to say these things aloud.

The underlying sense of victim-blaming combined with bizarre resentfulness that they were not the victims of a Muslim terrorist attack is grotesque, and openly smeared on their smug, entitled, wrinkly little faces.  

That’s not even getting into the ongoing prejudice and racism towards Maori in New Zealand, which certainly isn’t going to go away any time soon (choice quotes from customers: “they’re as cunning as a Maori dog,” and the old git who rambled on about the double-standards Pakeha are subjected to before my colleague dropped: “my husband is Maori” into his stream of verbal diarrhoea. He buggered off rather quickly after that, but guess who got an earful of his nonsense next time he decided to visit? Me, it was me).

So yeah. This has been the worst year since 2016 in terms of the horrible things that’ve happened in the world, all the more so because terrorism finally came to our isolated little islands, which I’ve long since believed (naively) would always be spared such horrors.

In the world of fandom, things weren’t much better – in regards to quality, not actual human suffering, obviously.

A staggering number of popular shows and franchises came to an end in 2019: Poldark, Orange is the New Black, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Elementary, iZombie, Killjoys, Into the Badlands – even stuff I haven’t gotten around to watching yet, like Jane the Virgin, Gotham, Mr Robot and Veep. There’s more scheduled for the chopping block in 2020: Arrow, The Good Place and Anne with an E have wrapped up, soon to be followed by the final seasons of Vikings, The 100, Homeland, How to Get Away with Murder… even Supernatural and The Big Bang Theory, after what feels like an eternity.

The Netflix Marvel shows came to a premature end, cheating both Luke Cage and (believe it or not) Iron Fist out of third seasons to wrap up their storylines, and among movie franchises we saw the X-Men go out with a whimper, How To Train Your Dragon manage considerably better, Toy Story 4 negate pretty much everything the last three films tried to teach us, and whatever the heck M. Night Shymalan’s Unbreakable trilogy was. Even It: Chapter Two brought home the concluding sequel this year.

And of course, the big three: The MCU, Game of Thrones and Star Wars. Ironically the one I cared about the least stuck its landing the best, whereas the latter two are currently undergoing a world-wide memory scrub.

Unsurprisingly there’s going to be a LOT more coming from all three of these franchises, but I find myself in a blissful state of calm knowing that I’m not going to watch any of them. I haven’t even seen TROS yet, and I doubt I will for a while given that fandom is a nightmare, it doesn’t sound very good anyway, and I’m totally oversaturated by the whole thing. I think it’s time we as a whole stepped away from these big blockbusters and sought out smaller, more interesting projects, which have a greater chance of being good (or at least thought-provoking) and result in fandoms that aren’t as insanely hysterical.

So it was the end of an era in many ways, and I had plenty to keep me busy: I got through all the Disney Princess films with a friend who had never seen any of them, cracked down on my TBR books and now only have a few thousand left to read, and saw some great stuff like The Dark Crystal: Resistance, Carnival Row, and the third season of Stranger Things. I suppose His Dark Materials fits in here too, as it was a treat to see it re-adapted for the screen, though it wasn’t anywhere as good as it could have been.

It was also a good year for the theatre, and I got to see Aladdin on stage, Swan Lake, The Wind in the Willows and Measure for Measure. Some times it makes all the difference to see a live performance instead of something on the screen.

There was also plenty of Alfred Hitchcock, though he’s not going to fit well into my New Year’s Resolution: to focus on stories that are female-centric and female-written. If 2019 taught me anything it’s that male writers in general (not in specific cases) still have a staggeringly long way to go when it comes to depicting female characters in ways that don’t render them as victims, sacrifices, nurturers, villains, or vessels for some dude’s redemption, emotional growth, or man-pain.

With that in mind, I’ve tried to make the following list something of a tribute to the women who didn’t get horribly treated by their respective stories in 2019…

Top Twelve Best Television/Film/Comic Moments of 2018

Back in 2017 I comprised a list of some of my favourite moments of that year’s television: the scenes that made me laugh, cry, shriek, or just appreciate the fine art of storytelling.

I couldn’t do the same in 2018, simply because I didn’t watch as many shows, at least not ones that aired that particular year. But I really enjoyed crafting my “best of 2017” post, and always wanted to do another.

So I’ve made myself a fresh list of great on-screen moments, though I had to broaden my horizons to include both films and material that aired before 2018. I’ve put moments that featured specifically in 2018 at the top of the list, though otherwise there’s no order or ranking here.

Top Twelve Best Television Moments of 2017 (that I watched)

I saw a lot of stuff this year, and I'm happy to say that most of it was pretty damn good. It's true that we're living in the golden age of television, and whatever your preferred genre – crime, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, dystopia, adventure, period drama – there's plenty on offer to fit your specific tastes, all of it reaching incredibly high standards.

There was plenty of "much watch" stuff I didn't watch, such as the live-action Beauty and the Beast and the final season of Sherlock, and by all accounts I didn't miss much (I may get to them eventually, if not just to complain about them). But I try to keep this blog relatively upbeat, so below the cut you'll find twelve of the best moments of my television viewing year. Some are humorous, some are heart-warming, but all of them struck a nerve in one way or another.

They're not ranked in any order, though I've tried listing chronologically according to their airdates (to the best of my memory – if I'm wrong, don't bother correcting me as I don't care that much). I did however leave my number one favourite till last...

Top Twelve Best Scenes in Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey has aired its Grand Finale in America, which means the show now feels as though it's truly come to an end. In the lead-up to the big event, I've been playing all the show's previous seasons as background noise while going about my daily tasks, just to get a big-picture sense of what the show was and where it ended up going.

Back when it first started, I recall Michelle Dockery saying in an interview that the show's appeal lay in the popularity of literary period dramas (such as those based on Jane Austen and Charles Dickens) but with the significant bonus of nobody knowing where the storylines would go. Everyone knows the plot of Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice, but Downton Abbey's originality lent the show a genuine sense of suspense in the progression of its relationships, scandals and character arcs.  

It's as good a reason as any to explain its popularity, though having watched through all six seasons (and the Christmas Specials) it's obvious Julian Fellowes was flying from the seat of his pants much of the time. Let's say, from season two onwards. 

Top Twelve Best Scenes in The Legend of Korra

Despite the title of this post, the following list admittedly encompasses my favourite scenes of The Legend of Korra rather than any objective attempt to rank "the best" moments on narrative or artistic merit. It's just asking for trouble to claim the definitive opinion on any given subject, so consider this disclaimer my insurance policy against potential "NO YOU'RE WRONG" comments.  

There is also no set theme to the entries on this list – these are scenes that could be described as heart-warming, tear-jerking, or just plain awesome. Some are lengthy sequences; others are brief moments that I thought were neat. The only thing they have in common is the impact they had on me: these are the bits that made me clutch my heart, gasp out loud, get a little misty-eyed, or any of the other embarrassing things you do when you're watching a TV show by yourself.

They're in no particular order beyond a rough "least to foremost" ranking, so don't take the placement of these examples too seriously.