Weekend Watchlist, 1/9: Rewind
What to watch this weekend
Happy New Year, PV Guide readers! If you haven’t voted in the PV Guide Reader’s Choice Awards, you have about a week to fill it out. Go do it! I want to hear what you liked the most in 2025.
There’s also a new episode out of Sports Movies That Don’t Suck, where I chat with writer and critic Joshua Rivera about the MMA movie Warrior, brotherhood, and cinematic fighting. It’s a good one, so give it a listen.
Now, onto this week’s picks!
The Action Year in Review - 2025
One of my very favorite yearly traditions is the release of Kinemotions’ Action Year in Review, which takes a global look at the genre and examines the trends and highlights in the year of action cinema. The 2025 edition came out recently, and as always it’s a fantastic study of the state of the action genre around the world, filled with great insight on movies I’ve already watched and/or loved, and more than two dozen new-to-me movies I instantly added to my watchlist. Even if you’re not a dedicated action movie fan, the videos are a fascinating continual study of the state of a particular art form around the world.
Taskmaster New Year’s Treat
For the first time ever, Taskmaster’s New Year Treat is a two-parter. The special brings in non-comedians to the Taskmaster format, and the 2026 rendition has an extremely fun crop of contestants from a variety of backgrounds – two musicians, an actor, an athlete, and a lexicographer. That’s quite the varied set of skills to bring to the show, and the results are delightful (and well worth two episodes instead of the usual one).
Bacurau
Watch at: Criterion Channel, free with a library card on Kanopy and Hoopla
I was talking to a friend earlier this week about how much I liked The Secret Agent, the new political thriller (and strong awards contender) from Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho. My friend mentioned that while he liked The Secret Agent just fine, Mendonça’s previous film Bacurau, which follows strange happenings in a small rural town after the death of its matriarch, was the real gem. Then I got an e-mail the next day informing me Bacurau was now on Criterion Channel. It felt like kismet. I’m hoping to watch it this weekend, and I hope you consider doing the same.
