Top 10 Movies of 2025

2025 was a weirdly bipolar year for American cinema. On the one hand, it featured a lot of terrific movies; on the other, depressingly few of them ever found a substantial audience beyond critics and hardcore film buffs. Sure, there were exceptions that broke through to mainstream success, or at least recognition. But for every Sinners or One Battle After Another (or, for that matter Train Dreams or KPop Demon Hunters) there was a film of comparable quality that failed to register. This isn’t exactly shocking news; it’s been clear for a while now that the industry is struggling to find its footing in our current media and pop culture landscape, in which fewer and fewer people are going “to” the movies and fewer young people are watching movies at all. But more recent tectonic shifts, like Netflix’s bid to buy Warner Brothers and the Oscars broadcast moving to YouTube in 2029, feel like the writing on the wall for those of us who love movies and still love seeing them in theaters.

We’re seeing the effects of this cultural shift trickle down locally, too, if my personal experience is any indicator. The preeminent, most centrally located arthouse movie theater in my city closed last spring, and in the last few months it was only through constant vigilance that I could keep track of when and where the movies I was most interested in (the potential awards contenders, not the blockbusters) were showing. In many cases, they only played at one or two theaters, often in the suburbs or exurbs, and for a very short time period; even my friends who like movies were wholly unaware that they had come and gone. And as if to confirm their irrelevance, I saw many of these films in nearly empty theaters, a far cry from the packed houses of not so long ago – remember “Barbenheimer”? Increasingly I fear movies as communal events are doomed to become one-offs, and the new normal will be years where there are no movies that most people have seen. I hate this for us. But at least for now, we still have the movies themselves, if you know where to look, and they’re spectacular.

1. SINNERS

I did not have “Ryan Coogler directs Southern Gothic vampire musical” on my movie bingo card for 2025, nor could I have predicted this would end up being my #1 of the year. But despite its outward genre trappings, Sinners isn’t really a horror movie and it isn’t even really about vampires. Rather, vampirism is a metaphorical vehicle for much broader historical and cultural themes, and the result is an extraordinarily rich, enthralling viewing (and listening) experience unlike anything I’ve ever seen. If the movie has a fault, it’s arguably a bit thematically overstuffed, but if it’s “about” anything, it’s about the American blues and everything that musical legacy embodies.

2. A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

An incredibly tense and deeply sobering dissection of how fucked we’d all be in a nuclear scenario that amazingly doesn’t rely at all on melodrama, special effects, or satire, despite its obvious debt to Fail-Safe and, of course, Dr. Strangelove. It just shows how the entire U.S. military and national security apparatus for dealing with a nuclear launch is set up to fail, even when it’s working exactly as designed. No one makes government procedure as gripping as Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim heightens the tension with a tripartite structure that I for one thought worked very effectively, though I seem to be in a minority.

3. SENTIMENTAL VALUE

Families break apart and find each other again – fumblingly and warily – in Joachim Trier’s film about a famous Norwegian-Swedish director (Stellan Skarsgard) who asks his estranged daughter (Renate Reinsve), an acclaimed stage actress, to play the lead in his first film in decades; when she refuses, he turns to an American movie star (Elle Fanning) to take the role. What follows is a delicate unfolding of many interrelated themes – father-daughter relationships, certainly, but also sister and mother-son relationships; aging; the weight of history; and the porousness between art and life – all illuminated by the superb, deservingly Oscar-nominated Skarsgaard, Reinsve, Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as the younger sister/daughter who’s suffered just as much from the dysfunctional family dynamics but much more quietly. Also, special props to the family house, which feels almost as much a character as the people who live in it.

4. HAMNET

Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel, which imagines the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet from the perspective of Shakespeare’s wife Agnes (aka Anne), is a gorgeous and heartrending film, rooted in emotionally searing performances by Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Paul Mescal as young Will Shakespeare, and a convincing case for art as sublimation of extreme grief. Warning: it may be difficult viewing at times, especially for parents; I’m not a parent and I still ugly-cried. But the final tears are beautifully cathartic.

5. BLACK BAG

Steven Soderbergh’s coolly elegant espionage whodunnit about a brilliant spy (Michael Fassbender) tasked with hunting a mole who may or may not be his own wife and fellow spy (Cate Blanchett), is pure Soderbergh and a pure delight. Imagine modern-day George Smiley (Fassbender’s character, probably not coincidentally, is also named George) if he were attractive, happily married, and well dressed (though not as well dressed as his wife – I craved Cate’s entire wardrobe for the film), but just as perceptive and methodical as Le Carré’s most iconic mole-hunter. It’s an enticing hook for an enjoyably twisty, stylish, and tightly paced brain-teaser that clocks in at a blissfully lean 90 minutes. While some of the plot’s convolutions frankly stretch credulity, the movie works thanks in large part to the crackling interplay not just between the two leads but between them and the supporting cast of suspects (Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela). This is a movie for grown-ups that also happens to be 100% fun, a rarity these days.

6. TRAIN DREAMS

Joel Edgerton delivers one of the best performances of the year, and of his career, in this quietly luminous adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella about an ordinary man who spends most of his life as a laborer in the Pacific Northwest. Even within the relatively limited contours of his existence and naturally taciturn (but far from insensible) personality, we see him experience great joy and beauty as well as unimaginable sorrow and ugliness, against the backdrop of a lush and gorgeously shot landscape that reflects both the transience of individual human lives and the indelible impact they leave behind. Wisely, the film makes the protagonist significantly more sympathetic than he is in the book, and Edgerton draws with great subtlety and sensitivity on the character’s inner depths to create a life worth examining.

7. WAKE UP DEAD MAN

The third and easily the best installment of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series is a classic “locked room” whodunnit with an appropriately twisty – if somewhat unnecessarily drawn out – mystery and a fun, typically stacked cast, with Josh O’Connor and Glenn Close as particular standouts. But what really elevates this one is its surprisingly moving and honest disquisition of religion: while Johnson doesn’t soft-pedal his disdain for those who manipulate it for selfish ends, he also presents a genuinely appealing vision of faith as a source of healing and forgiveness that stands up to the intellectual skepticism of even a Benoit Blanc. Whether you’re a true believer, confirmed secularist, or somewhere in between, you should walk away not just entertained but spiritually satisfied.

8. THE SECRET AGENT

Despite the title, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s latest film is not an espionage tale, though it is a thriller about a man (Wagner Moura) who must go into hiding to escape a politically powerful enemy. But boy, is it about so much more than that – I would almost say TOO much, as there are so many plots, subplots, and themes, they don’t all feel finished and they don’t entirely come together. But that may be by design, as fundamentally I think this is a movie about memory, its gaps, and the difficulty of filling in those gaps and keeping memories alive by preserving or, in some cases, (re)constructing them. In this respect, it’s a great companion piece to last year’s I’m Still Here, though I think this one is slightly stronger. It’s anchored by Moura’s fantastic performance and the rich, complex picture Mendonça Filho paints of 1970s Brazil, at once mired in corruption and violence and bursting with the vibrant spirit of carnival, survival, and human connection.

9. THE MASTERMIND

As with most Kelly Reichardt films, the key to enjoying this one is to adjust to her pacing (some would say glacial, I say deliberate) and to suspend conventional narrative expectations. Here, the title is something of a joke, as the central character (Josh O’Connor) is anything but; he’s an aimless dude in 1970s Massachusetts who decides to rob a local art museum but goes about it so ineptly that things start to unravel the minute the stolen works are in his hands. True to form for Reichardt, the result isn’t a typical heist film (jazzy score notwithstanding) or a broad comedy, but rather a thoughtful, nuanced character study – albeit one that’s quite funny at times – as well as a carefully crafted period piece that uses the Vietnam-era setting as an ongoing counterpoint to the protagonist’s self-absorption. If you’re able to deal with the latter, you'll find a rewarding exploration of, in Reichardt’s words, whether a person can “really remain separate from what’s going on around [them].”

10. Tie:

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

Jafar Panahi’s clandestinely directed film about a group of former Iranian political prisoners forced to decide what to do when one of their former torturers (or is he?) ends up under their control is at once a riveting thriller, a sharp indictment of authoritarianism, and a gentler, even laugh out loud human comedy that’s ultimately most interested in what makes victims different (or not) from their tormentors. Some of the moral turns feel a bit overdetermined, but overall this is a powerful and thought-provoking work. It also has what may be the best, most brilliantly ambiguous ending of the year.

and

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

While I didn’t love this one quite as much as everyone else, I enjoyed it, and it’s definitely stuck with me in the months since I saw it. Very loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it’s a fun – and frequently very funny – ride with virtuosic action set pieces, excellent physical comedy from Leonardo DiCaprio (a fresh reminder of how much I prefer spiraling comic Leo to spiraling dramatic Leo), and compelling supporting turns by Benicio del Toro as the community “sensei” and newcomer Chase Infiniti as the daughter caught up in the conflict. On the minus side, though it clocks in at nearly three hours, it doesn’t fully develop key characters, borders on squicky in its handling of certain racial dynamics, and makes at best a muddled case for the revolutionaries even as it ultimately celebrates their resilience. But overall, it works as both an action comedy and a surprisingly moving story of fathers and daughters. If this is the film that finally gets Paul Thomas Anderson his Oscar(s), I’m fine with that.

Honorable mentions: Father Mother Sister Brother; Blue Moon; Nouvelle Vague; Eternity; KPop Demon Hunters