We did it! We survived 2025! Against all odds we’re still standing, like a bunch of haggard, exhausted Elton Johns. And while this year was unfortunately a good year for fascism and pathetic wannabe dictators, it was quite fortunately a great year for movies! The below are my top ten favorites of the year, but as always, I have to open this piece with a few caveats:
First and foremost, this list is a snapshot, and I already feel differently about it than I did when I locked it down for my podcast (coming out on 1/15). Chances are it’ll change tomorrow and then again the next day and so on and so forth.
Secondly, these are my favorites, not the best. I would never reduce art to the realm of the objective.
Finally, I hadn’t yet seen The Secret Agent when I locked this down, and had I seen it, it very well could’ve made the list. It’s an excellent film. Go see it! It’s out right now!!!
Aaaaaaanywho, here are my favs of 2025:
10. Den of Thieves: Pantera (dir. – Christian Gudegast)
If the original Den of Thieves was a riff on Heat, this dreamier, more melodramatic follow up is a riff on Miami Vice. One part heist movie, one part chase movie, and two parts dreamy European romance (unintentional, but heavy), this oddball mashup is a film I’ve thought about almost daily since I first saw it back in January. Pure entertainment, filled with fun surprises and beefy characters being beefy characters. Who cares if Lil’ Cube’s accent work is atrocious? It suits the film.
9. After The Hunt (dir. – Luca Guadagnino)
A sort of B-side the Guadagnino’s Challengers, this bitchy little satire is a black comedy in disguise, filled to bursting with horned-up people who are so horned up they can’t help but destroy one another. While it’s easy to regard this as a post-Me Too statement (complete with a “Times Up” ticking clock motif), that’s only scratching the surface. What’s really being explored is the notion of “Main Character Syndrome” and the ease with which we all justify our worst behaviors via a malleable and ethereal transactional social ledger.
“We want accountability!!”
Accountability to who? You???? Fuck off.
8. No Other Choice (dir. – Park Chan-Wook)
When the bottom line is all the company cares about, the title of this movie becomes the refrain at every level. The company is “a family” until the shareholders can’t afford their second boat, then it’s “we had no other choice but to throw your ass on the streets.” The playful, crisp directorial style of Park Chan-Wook turns this loose Westlake adaptation into a horrific fable that feels a bit too close to home for, well, most everyone reading this blurb. It’s a family drama, a madcap comedy, and a stirring, violent thriller, and even as our protagonist goes through the gamut of detestable behaviors to make himself more hireable, we can’t stop rooting for him. We have no other choice.
7. The Plague (dir. – Charlie Polinger)
Little boys can be so cruel. Little boys in competition with one another, doubly so. When a group of youths at a water polo camp cast aside their teammate, who they’ve not-so-lovingly dubbed “The Plague” on account of a chronic skin rash, a newcomer struggles between breaking social rank and upholding this cruel ostracization when he finds out that the The Plague, for all his weirdness, is a pretty interesting guy. Polinger has found an uncommonly talented roster of child actors, giving nuance to each of their characters in ways other child-centric movies often fail. The Plague is being pushed as a body horror film, and it’s not not that, but it’s so much more. I remember being a little boy, and this captured it perfectly. Also, Joel Edgerton, as the well-intentioned coach, wears flip-flops for the entire movie.
6. Barrio Triste (dir. – Stillz)
Multiple found footage movies were released this year, with each promising “tell yourself it’s only a movie” levels of fright, and as a huge fan of the form (who is currently in post-production on a film of his own), I found the bulk of them to be lacking (Tinsman Road and Alan At Night being exceptions to this), and I found none of them to be the game changers I’d hoped for. So it pleased me greatly when I flew blind into Barrio Triste, the feature debut of music video director/still photographer Stillz. The film follows the chaotic exploits of a group of young boys in Medellin, all captured through the lens of a stolen news camera. It would be a spoiler to say much beyond this, but the film has a unique sci-fi angle that carries a tremendous amount of thematic depth — when there’s no way out of volatile circumstances, who could blame anyone for taking a lifeline from something mysterious?
This bizarre treat suits my personal tastes to a T. In fact, I’d recommend it to only the most cinematically adventurous moviegoers. The best way to describe it is this: when Barrio Triste rolled credits, the crowd at the Philadelphia Film Festival was absolutely baffled … until “Produced by Harmony Korine” came across the screen.
A collective “ohhhhhhhhh, okay” occurred.
5. Eddington (dir. – Ari Aster)
The refrain among negative reviews for Eddington was something to the effect of “it’s too soon after the pandemic to say anything interesting about it.” What Ari Aster — a filmmaker operating on a different level than anyone in the biz — understood is that the American memory hole is vast, hungry, and quicker than a COVID infection at an orgy. Heck, we’ve already forgotten the bulk of how insane we all acted, as well as the cruel, selfish ways we acted toward one another. In a world where we’ll happily politicize everything except the stuff we should probably politicize, it takes a film like Eddington to point a finger at everyone in the room and say “you’re acting like a fucking dipshit.”
The inholy butt baby of South Park, No Country For Old Men, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, and Repo Man, this is a film where no one is safe, and a plea is made to turn the volume down … by turning the volume way up.
I laughed myself stupid, cringed myself dumb, and on more than one occasion thought to myself “ahhhh shit, that was directed at me, and it was spot on.”
4. Tatami (dir. -Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Guy Nattiv)
I love a sports movie, but there are only so many permutations of win/lose/draw that can be scripted in a compelling way (Rocky franchise notwithstanding, which has somehow milked this for half a century, and quite successfully). Tatami manages to freshen up the genre by introducing not just a personal angle, but a political one (and not in a hammy and stupid way like in Rocky IV). Shot in high-contrast black and white and set to a percussive drum score, Tatami is high-art with the energy and intensity of a blockbuster. And even if you don’t have the political context to understand the specifics, the film gives you everything you need to know in real time. Same goes for the specifics of Judo — the rules are never explained, but by the end you’ll have a full understanding. Shout out to Zar Amir Ebrahimi for co-writing, co-directing, and co-starring, delivering an impressive performance in all three fields.
Who’d have expected that one of the best sports movies ever made would be one based on Women’s Judo, rather than the big three blockbusters (football, baseball, bare knuckle macramé)?
3. One Battle After Another (dir. – Paul Thomas Anderson)
What can I say about this film that hasn’t already been said by everyone else on the planet? My favorite living American filmmaker is operating on all cylinders here, delivering a timeless, current, and likely prescient epic that takes plays in a very realistic yet wholly absurd world. This is the one where everyone gets an Oscar, and those who don’t will be seen as all time legendary snubs. I just wish Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn could both win for Supporting (but in a pinch I’m going with the former). From directing to acting to cinematography to score, everything about this 70mm (IMAX! Vistavision!) thriller-action-comedy is a celebration of what film should be.
At a time when America is suddenly forced to recognize that our robust Constitution is defenseless against a petulant despot who has surrounded himself with spineless sycophants who would happily suck his dick in front of their spouse at his request, it’s hard not to see oneself represented by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob, a man who has let his once revolutionary edge dull in a world with the privilege of complacency. Since 2016, America has been forced to awaken from its drunken haze and realize that the previous generations have let us down, and the next generation, under our care, may just save us.
All hail Jim Downey, whose appearance here and in the excellent The Chair Company has helped put the face of perhaps the greatest living comedy writer into mainstream eyes.
2. Marty Supreme (dir. -Josh Safdie)
The second part of 2025’s Safdie split (the first being the unfairly maligned The Smashing Machine) also serves as the unofficial end to the “volatile and ambitious New Yorker stops at nothing to get what he wants” trilogy, preceded by the pre-split duo of Good Time and Uncut Gems. This breakneck-paced, sweeping tale of a wannabe ping-pong champion and his willingness to do anything at all to succeed is a real butt-clencher. As Chalamet’s Marty Mauser borrows, steals, schmoozes, and (rarely) begs in order get what he wants, he can’t help but to leave in his wake heaps of social and physical destruction. As he takes great pains to outrun his freshly minted enemies while also courting his appetite for vice, Mauser must reckon with the fact that even though he really is a top-tier ping-pong player … no one gives a shit. It’s ping-pong.
It’s not all empty thrills either. This is a tale of ambition, performative masculinity, and Jewish identity in mid-century New York. But what spoke to me most is the way it ruminates on hobbies and passions: in an age when everybody seems to be auditioning at all times, and every hobby is monetized, it’s nice to see a film that shows the pitfalls of doing something you love for reasons other than that you love to do it.
It also features my single favorite line in any 2025 film.
1. Sinners (dir. – Ryan Coogler)
This is the best movie of the year. And while my top five are pretty much interchangeable, the number one slot was never not going to be Sinners. After a single original film, Ryan Coogler fell into franchise bondage, and did so with more cinematic ingenuity than anyone who ever found themselves in a similar position. He started with what remains the best Rocky movie, and then cranked out two of the MCU’s top entries. Finally free from established IP, he built a genre-defying art house blockbuster, the likes of which can only be matched by something like One Battle After Another.
What starts as a compelling, high-energy drama about two men (played by one guy — and you’d never know it if you didn’t know it) opening a Black juke joint in the Jim Crow era American South, soon becomes an action-packed, thematically rich vampire flick where every frame is a painting, every production detail a resonant choice, and every line a poetic, cool-as-hell servant of theme, story, and character. It’s a tale of creation (human) versus appropriation (vampire), and the many ways this persistent ideological war ties to each individual character and the social politics of the setting. It’s a dense web of thematic connection executed with intellect and style.
Coogler’s use of music is unrivaled by any filmmaker working today, as evidenced by a showstopping mid-film musical performance that not only expands the supernatural mythology of the story, but also celebrates the indelible contribution of Black music to humanity on the whole. It’s a jaw-on-the-floor piece of filmmaking, and it’s just one in a sea of them, all culminating in a true cinematic rarity: a singularly iconic superstar moment (hint: it involves Michael B. Jordan and a Tommy gun).
Sinners remains one of the best moviegoing experiences I’ve had all year, and even watching it at home (the 4K is gorgeous), it remains a real barn burner (pun intended), complete with two essential post-credit sequences that add so much to what came before, proving that you can take the filmmaker out of the MCU, but you can’t take the MCU out of the filmmaker. And if anyone can synthesize the tools of IP-driven spectacle into something as original and stirring as Sinners, then that someone can be trusted with anything. It’s why I don’t mind that Coogler is rebooting The X-Files — it’s guaranteed to be good, and you can take that straight from me, a literal Scully with the heart of a Mulder.
Coogler is the realest of deals, and he and his team made the best movie of 2025, which just so happens to be one of the best films I’ve ever seen.
Honorable mentions: Weapons, Resurrection, Hysteria, Together, Mickey 17, Souleymane’s Story, Zodiac Killer Project, Frankenstein, Die My Love, The Life of Chuck, Lurker, 28 Years Later, Drop, The Baltimorons GAHHH I COULD GO ON FOREVER
