I start out every year end review saying this because it is always true: it was a good year for movies! Though this year was upsetting on a number of levels, and particularly for the movie industry, there was still plenty of awe and beauty to behold on the silver screen. The Netflix consumption of Warner Bros. bodes poorly for the future of moviegoing, on top of all of the destruction that the Trump administration wrought on the country. Appropriately, many of my top films of the year reflect these troubled times, taking direct aim at the deep rot that has been rapidly bubbling to the surface. It feels validating to have such tremendous works of art tell us that we are not insane, and we are not just imagining it all.
10. Eddington (Dir. Ari Aster)
Making a docu-dramatic recreation of the absolute chaos of the George Floyd protests in the early summer of 2020 may still seem too soon. We lived through it and re-lived through it so thoroughly online, what purpose could cinema serve in re-creating it? But the way that Eddington turns this recent memory into the increasingly satirical and absurd made me realize that in many ways, 2020 never really ended. As the final frame of the film lingers, feel-bad director extraordinaire Ari Aster seems to suggest that this recent past is merely the prelude to a dark near future.
9. Sorry, Baby (Dir. Eva Victor)
Eva Victor’s loud-throated arrival into the movie world is a high-wire tonal balancing act, and as impressive a directorial (and starring!) debut as anything in recent memory. Portraying a young woman coping with the aftermath of a destabilizing transgression in her life, Victor finds the humor and warmth that can exist alongside the pain in trauma recovery. I found it reminded me of a post mumblecore comedy Manchester By The Sea, and then Lucas Hedges showed up as a potential love interest. Let’s call it an unlikely spiritual sequel.
8. Parthenope (Dir. Paolo Sorrentino)
Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino seems to be singularly focused on capturing beauty onscreen, but contrasting it with the inherent sadness of life itself. Are we humans too distracted by our own troubles to fully see the beauty that surrounds us? This is perfectly encapsulated by the titular character, Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta), a sort of mythical siren who seems to walk through walls on the Italian coast of the Mediterranean Sea, entrancing the many men she comes across. But there is nothing sinister about this film or her presence- no ulterior motive beyond beauty itself. Cue the plastic bag floating in the wind. Sorrentino’s film is a bit messy and gets easily distracted on side-quests that don’t particularly go anywhere (which is sort of this thing), but Parthenope showed serious staying power for me this year.
7. Cloud (Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
This odd genre mash-up plays like a bad nightmare for any people pleasers. What if every person you ever pissed off decided to band together and hunt you down to kill you? With Cloud, Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa blends a masterful combination of dry wit with a grim view of humanity. An online reseller who makes a habit of scamming his buyers pushes his luck a little too far and finds himself the target of a violent retribution campaign. When Cloud turns into a shoot-em-up action flick, you look at where the story began and contend with how ridiculous the internet has made the world we live in.
6. The Long Walk (Dir. Francis Lawrence)
Having gestated for a long time in development hell, 2025 felt like the perfect year for Stephen King’s dreary dystopian tale to finally come to life. In a year where 34 year old Zohran Mamdani coasted to an easy victory in the New York City mayoral race on a platform of economic disenchantment, it was clear that many young Americans were angry about the dark look of the future. In The Long Walk, young men compete in a Hunger Games style (though this book was written in the late 1970’s, so you can flip the order of influence) competition to see who can literally be the last person standing. That person gets a big pot of money. Everyone else? Left dead on the road. I was impressed though by how the movie goes beyond dystopian shock value to focus more on the friendships formed between these doomed young men. We know where their road leads as reality settles in and their naivete runs dry. But this great young cast makes connection in itself seem like an act of brave rebellion.
5. Friendship (Dir. Andrew DeYoung)
Tim Robinson may be best known for his outstanding and thoroughly meme-ified sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave, but 2025 saw him portraying his signature cringe brokenness with a little more unnerving sincerity. With Friendship being a feature length film, the camera can’t cut away so quickly, and the viewer is left to sit a little bit longer with this ridiculous man who looks so weird in his own skin. The laughs don’t come out of your mouth as much as they seep out of the pores of your soul, in between squirmish screams.
4. Sirāt (Dir. Oliver Laxe)
“A group of people go through an ordeal as World War III breaks out in the background” is a tried and true film logline. But none of those other ordeals involve a group of desert ravers (a subculture I was unaware of) in Morocco searching for a man’s lost daughter who might be at another rave even deeper in the Saharan desert, creating a brilliant moodboard that pairs films like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer with the legendary surfing doc The Endless Summer. The hypnotic end times drone of Sirāt was one of my most captivating, transporting watches of the year.
3. No Other Choice (Dir. Park Chan-Wook)
Park Chan-Wook’s latest makes a great pairing with Cloud, another absurd satire of modern work life. A South Korean family man gets laid off from his job in a humiliating fashion. Stretched beyond his limits, he finds that murdering his competition is an acceptable step to regaining his and his family’s stability. No Other Choice feels like an update of the eat-the-rich Parasite, made six years later where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown even wider. Only now, the vanishing middle class have to eat the rich, because the safety net protecting them from the bottom has unraveled too.
2. The Testament Of Ann Lee (Dir. Mona Fastvold)
Last year’s The Brutalist was an impressive foray into glanced over American history from filmmaking couple Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. This year the pair returned and switched writer/director roles for The Testament Of Ann Lee, about the titular 18th century American immigrant heroine who led the Shaker religion as a female Christ-like figure. Presented with all of the intricate period production of The Brutalist, this movie ups the ante by involving musical numbers! At times I thought I was watching one of the best films of the last several years, so ecstatic are the highs of The Testament of Ann Lee, mirroring the feeling of searching for and grasping the divine. Amanda Seyfried shines in a career best performance. When the soundtrack comes out, it will be on repeat for me.
1. 28 Years Later (Dir. Danny Boyle)
It feels fitting to cap this end of year list like we started, with another movie that responds so directly to the long lasting hangover of the pandemic. 28 Years Later seemed at first just a legacy sequel joining the pack of obligatory legacy sequels, returning to continue a story with little narrative through-line that spawned so many copy cats. Yet no other film this year so poignantly captured the moment we find ourselves in, where denial and regression reign supreme and the forces of COVID backlash have driven us directly into the terrible political moment we find ourselves in. In 2025 it felt like society itself tried to pretend the whole thing never happened. An influential chunk of survivors seemed to forget the millions of lives lost and focus instead on the personal inconveniences they had to suffer through, as hard as they might have seemed. I felt a sort of sorrow rise within me as 28 Years Later so well displayed this backwards march we find ourselves in. Then in a virtuoso climax, Danny Boyle’s direction, Alex Garland’s script, and Ralph Fiennes’ incredible performance all join for the scene of the year. I was not expecting this “zombie” movie to be such a profound meditation on making room for grief when the world wants you to live in denial. The movie allowed me to feel the enormity of things lost to COVID that I had pushed down for far too long. It felt like a beautiful relief.
And a few more…Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera, It Ends, Jay Kelly, Nobody 2, One Battle After Another, Rabbit Trap, Sentimental Value, Sinners, Train Dreams, Weapons
