Favorite Movies of 2025

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MoviesRankingsBest of 2025

Author

Spencer Tuckerman

Published

December 31, 2025

Every year I tell myself I’m gonna watch fewer movies. The problem is I like watching tons of movies. The only time I ever really watch anything out of obligation is when it’s a new release. I have a nasty habit of feeling like I need a complete understanding of the year in film. Last year this led to me watching 91 new releases. Did I really need to spend an evening watching the British animated Christmas movie That Christmas? Did I need to spend 103 of my precious minutes on this earth with the Dylan O’Brien vehicle Caddo Lake? I will never watch these movies again. They never even crossed my mind in 2025.

And so I entered this year with this mentality: Stop watching stuff you know is unimportant just because it’s new. It didn't work. I watched 93 new releases this year and probably a dozen of those could be counted as an objective waste of my time. But hey. I now have a near-complete handle on the last 12 months in cinema.

So, how was 2025? Incredible at the top, tons of good-not-great after that. I had a very easy time selecting my 5-7 favorites and a tremendously hard time sorting through how to rank movies #8 through #30ish. It means there’s ton to recommend but, as of now, maybe not a lot that will stick for years to come.

But the stuff that was good is magical. I think the two best movies of the 2020s came out this year, alongside them a handful of movies by some of my favorite directors––Ari Aster, Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linkater, Kelly Reichardt––that I’ll inevitably live with for years and years as I rewatch their filmographies.

Watch 93 movies and there’s no such thing as a bad year.

More of this…

letterboxd Film list: 2025, ranked.

What I missed…

93. Opus dir. Mark Anthony Green

If Blink Twice is the cheap ripoff of Get Out, then Opus is the ChatGPT iteration on Blink Twice. This doesn't do a single thing right. Almost awe-inspiring.

92. Another Simple Favor dir. Paul Feig

I remember thinking the first in this series was surprisingly fun before ultimately caving to an extremely stupid resolution. Another Simple Favor picks right up where its predecessor left off. It reflects a bleak state of affairs that a studio felt the need to circle back to this material seven years later for a direct-to-streaming reheat, and the resulting film emits the stink of this decision.

91. You’re Cordially Invited dir. Nicholas Stoller

Nicholas Stoller directed one of the best rom-coms of the 21st century in 2008 and has spent the ensuing years throwing up bricks. This feels twice as long as its runtime, isn't nearly as funny as it needs to be, and falls directly within my least favorite comedy subgenre by rooting its humor in everything going wrong and everyone hating each other. Even the very best of this ilk (say, Meet the Parents) are a struggle for me, so something playing those beats with a half-baked script and mailed-in performances is a very tough hang.

90. Wicked: For Good dir. John M. Chu

The first one of these––which was not good but I found enjoyable enough––really spoils the second film, which is much of the same, just with an unavoidably baffling narrative structure and without any of the stuff that actually worked. There's nowhere to hide here.

And at the risk of getting caught up in the emotional wake of my screening experience, this may be the single ugliest film I've ever seen in a theater. Everyone talks about the color or lack thereof but I think this discussion lets the rest of the photography off easy. This is a movie shot without perspective or intent. It's as if they strapped the camera to a Roomba and just cut it loose while they ran lines. This bears the photographic eye of a '90s camcorder dad.

Absolutely abysmal stuff.

89. Cleaner dir. Martin Campbell

Repeats a mistake a lot of these kinds of movies make by trying way too hard to convince me it’s above B-movie pitfalls, oblivious to the fact that’s the only reason I’m watching.

88. Fountain of Youth dir. Guy Ritchie

I don’t love reacting to movies in this way, but there's really only so much I can hate an adventure movie with this scale. If National Treasure is a watered-down Indiana Jones, then this is a watered-down National Treasure. And if this had any sense for how to conclude its story, it would have earned a passing grade, flaws and all.

Turteltaub is no Spielberg, but at least he had a sense for what makes these movies tick. Ford was born to play Indy, but Cage is still awfully serviceable as Benjamin Gates. He's a performer who's wily enough to sell even the most outlandish script and charismatic enough to make it fun, even grounded.

Krasinski, meanwhile, simply has none of the sauce––just one problem in a movie that spends $180 million running in place around the globe. This guy played Jim Halpert on the back of an office drone, everyman quality, and has spent the ensuing years desperately trying (with a lot of success!) to be an action star. Simply a confounding career arc that defies all logic. Can't help but feel like almost any other 40-something white guy would've worked better here.

87. Happy Gilmore 2 dir. Kyle Newacheck

A raft of product placements, celebrity cameos, and lukewarm nostalgia ploys wrapped around a handful of funny gags and a legitimately great Benny Safdie performance. I guess it's what I expected, but still pretty nuts that the plot of Happy Gilmore 2 is literally just "Hey, remember Happy Gilmore?"

(Not the worst way to spend a Friday night on the couch.)

86. Good Fortune dir. Aziz Ansari

Mr. Riyadh makes a movie about how life is worth living if you're poor because of tacos and laughter. Maybe I was just not in the right mood, but I found this to be extraordinarily bleak.

85. Bring Her Back dir. Michael and Danny Philippou

Incredibly tedious. I didn't love Talk To Me, but I felt like there was enough in it to be interested in what the Philippous were up to. This is a step in the wrong direction––a blunt-force depiction of grief packed with more unearned grandeur than successful tricks, setting its sights on an obvious endpoint very quickly and then arriving there in a straight line.

I think it's especially frustrating in the age of AI when "hey, do not under any circumstances become obsessed with reanimating the dead" actually *is* a necessary reminder. Instead, I'd direct you to pretty much any other film on the subject.

I like a horror movie that's fun––either in its plot or in the elegance of its construction. This is not fun.

84. Materialists dir. Celine Song

Anyone who's been in a successful relationship will tell you that love is a magical, mysterious, perfect force that in many ways holds our entire existence together, but that relationships––especially marriages––are largely the opposite. They're scary and illogical and oddly rooted in simple logistics: Puzzle pieces that need to fit together either through sheer luck or some light manipulation. Very few movies are willing to be realistic about this, which is why I really love the ones that are. I love an un-romantic romance.

I only bring all this up to illustrate that there were a few times I thought this movie was going to connect as a kid of blunt force romance, which explicitly externalizes all these gross little bits of red tape we sort through in our heads either shamefully or subconsciously. Instead, I'm left absolutely BAFFLED. I thought Celine Song's Past Lives was pretty special, especially for a debut, but watching this movie will have you questioning if she's ever had a relationship with another human.

I frequently love Dakota Johnson, but I have to admit it's odd that she's what works best here. No fault to Evans or Pascal, as they're good actors done no favors by this script that oscillates between paint-by-numbers and romance film uncanny valley. Any time the movie slows down for a conversation between two people, strap in, because you're about to get 70 years of the genre synthesized into a few minutes of shot-reverse shot torture.

What the hell was this? What a bummer.

83. Kinda Pregnant dir. Tyler Spindel

Listen, I am not above some Happy Madison trash, and this is indeed trash.

...but I also laughed more than I'd like to admit. Sorry. Watch it late at night.

82. Love Me dir. Andrew and Sam Zuchero

Very funny to conjure up the vastness of time and space and the miraculous power love has to form bridges across it, only to deliver a message that boils down to "be urself :)"

It's got a pretty promising first act though!

81. Ballad of a Small Player dir. Edward Berger

This reminded me a bit of Guadagnino’s Queer except for it’s straight and boring.

80. Companion dir. Drew Hancock

Thankfully, not as smug as Thatcher's last film, but it still slots pretty seamlessly into the Thought-Provoking Movies For Dumb People genre that seems to only be growing. She's pretty good here, and so is Quaid, despite a screenplay that feels written to be recapped on TikTok.

79. Freakier Friday dir. Nisha Ganatra

I probably like this a little less than I should, given how annoying I find Jamie Lee Curtis in 2025. The GM needs to get Julia Butters out of Triple-A before we stunt her development.

78. M3GAN 2.0 dir. Gerard Johnstone

Actually, a bit more evolved in its thinking on AI than the original (two more years of living with the robots will do that), but not quite as fun, partly owed to a two-hour runtime. These movies have a 90-minute shelf life. I don't know who let them mess that up. And the ending absolutely reeks.

77. Eenie Meanie dir. Shawn Simmons

If you wished Baby Driver were less annoying and didn't force you to spend time with Ansel Elgort and Kevin Spacey, and are from Cleveland, I have the perfect movie for you.

Competently made but just so... nothing. A classic streamer in that way.

76. House of Dynamite dir. Kathryn Bigelow

Built like a docudrama for an event that never happened, which helps provide the film a kinetic and aesthetic framework, but of course can't provide it the heft, perspective, or meaning of an actual event. Despite a nice tempo and a handful of performers I like, I can't help but wonder what on earth the point is, especially with so many other movies across the history of the medium that caution against (?) a climate of nuclear war. I gave up hope the moment it started Rashomon-ing.

75. Frankenstein dir. Guillermo del Toro

Kind of depressing when your whole thing is that you're obsessed with Frankenstein and you finally get to make it, and it looks like Wicked and everyone watches it on their TV.

It's been a while since I've read the novel, but this feels awfully faithful as far as adaptations go. The trouble is that GDT seems to have sucked all the life out of a story he clearly cares a lot about, leaving us a film desperately in search of the bite of 2021's quiet masterpiece, Nightmare Alley. The parts are all here, but it feels kind of inert––a weird, accidental meta commentary for a movie about ill-advised creations.

(But I like that they did the Arctic stuff! Feels like nobody ever does the Arctic stuff!)

74. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere dir. Scott Cooper

Negatives: Absolutely drives full speed into many of the typical music biopic potholes. Some utterly horrendous dialogue in here, much of it delivered by a preposterously self-serious Jeremy Strong. I get that’s kind of his whole thing, but it was the wrong thing for this.

Positives: After working through most of the trite beats it does kind of get to an interesting portrait of creative fixation, which I guess I haven’t really seen on screen. Bruce absolutely fetishizes Badlands and The Night of the Hunter, we get a quick nod to Schrader’s script, and, ya know, the music is good.

73. Paddington in Peru dir. Dougal Wilson

Bad news: The Paddington franchise has regressed to the mean.

72. Boys Go to Jupiter dir. Julian Glander

Interested to see more from Glander but this one’s often too “smol bean” for my tastes.

71. Dear Kelly dir. Andrew Callaghan & Elliot Liedgren

Parts of this strike gold. Andrew views Kelly with empathy despite disagreeing with him, and I think he's able to zero in on the external (and largely apolitical) factors that contribute to disenfranchisement and radicalization. I think these are conversations we should be having.

And yet I think it also butts up against something Andrew has always struggled with, awkwardly oscillating between a piece of objective journalism and something more personal. The moments in which Andrew himself is a character in the film are frankly odd. Bouncing back and forth between neutral observer and silly participant might work on YouTube, but it's jarring within the context of a single film, especially one approaching a serious topic. Andrew very successfully makes the connection between Kelly's radicalization and the implosion of his personal life, but the moments in which he tries to create parallels between himself and Kelly are kind of ridiculous.

70. Wick Is Pain dir. Jeffrey Doe

This would probably count as essential viewing if you’re a Wick diehard or an aspiring action filmmaker. If you’re not in one of those groups, it feels a bit like two or three DVD featurettes strung together.

69. Ballerina dir. Len Wiseman

Weird movie. Not that Ana de Armas is coming for an Oscar any time soon, but she certainly has a screen presence, and this film feels completely disinterested in tapping into it. This lead role is disappointingly anonymous––soulless, sauceless, whatever you want to say. Eve could've been played by anyone, which feels like a missed opportunity.

It all contributes to making this feel a lot more like a John Wick knockoff than a John Wick spinoff, but if you aren't locked in when the flamethrowers come out, then I can't relate to you.

68. The Life of Chuck dir. Mike Flanagan

Perhaps says more about some of my own cynicism than it does about the movie, but this never really got close to “working” for me.

It opens with this really strange and scary and melancholic “third act,” but when King needs to resolve it, everything falls apart, because of course it does. Not only is he a writer who (despite my appreciation for a lot of his work) struggles with deep and nuanced human emotion, but he’s written himself into a corner with this story. There’s no way to write yourself out of the apocalypse of a man’s mind, as exciting and rewarding as that idea can be for a bit. So he hits you with this great opening and then has no exit except through every rote idea you’ve seen in other storytelling. I certainly didn’t hate it, but it slams into all the roadblocks I expected.

67. Last Breath dir. Alex Parkinson

Pretty fun little trash thriller—“trash” being the operative word. Not particularly impressed with these performances, and I found the construction to be pretty disorienting, even before it was supposed to be. (Lots of “Wait, where are we?” and “What is this guy trying to do?”)

But that doesn’t matter in a story this good if you can keep the plotting on a steady rhythm, and they’ve nailed that, at least through the middle 80 minutes or so. Worth a watch!

66. Elio dir. Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina

I want a redo on this, starting from the end of the first act. This goes from Good Pixar Movie to Mid Pixar Movie in a hurry right at the 25-minute mark, devolving from a sci-fi story about a kid looking for belonging in the stars into something much more convoluted. There's no way children are even able to follow this.

65. KPop Demon Hunters dir. Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang

The screenplay is not doing much for me, which is not a shock. Music is great though!

64. Oh, Hi! dir. Sophie Brooks

Has one good idea (what if Misery, but for situationships) and feebly tries to construct a whole movie around that. It's pretty tedious as a statement on modern dating but it consistently surprised me with its humor through the second and third acts when it leaned a bit more towards weird caper. (Then, more tediousness!) Kind of a great little cast, aside from Logan Lerman, who––my apologies––is very bad.

63. Honey Don’t! dir. Ethan Coen

Very much like Drive-Away Dolls in that I'm not even sure how good it is, but I know that I had fun and I'm glad it exists, especially as a Margaret Qualley season ticket holder. And when you're someone with Ethan Coen's resume, I think you've more than earned the right to make some late-career curiosities with your wife/creative partner.

I know things are not as cut-and-dry as they appear, but it's been fascinating to watch the Coen brothers' solo work over the last four years as it reveals a bit about what each brings to the duo. My takeaway is that together they consistently make some of my all-time favorite movies, and apart, I have no evidence they ever will.

62. Echo Valley dir. Michael Pearce

I think the mark of success for any domestic thriller is the ability to keep my investment, bring in a few twists, and––perhaps most importantly––make me feel absolutely terrible about the world. This succeeds on those metrics, even if it's particularly silly and does nothing to advance the genre as a whole.

61. Secret Mall Apartment dir. Jeremy Workman

Pretty deftly delivers wacky human interest while contrasting the cost of urban renewal and American consumerism against the power of art and human coalition.

It would pair well with Roofman for the obvious reason, but also because they're each 2025 films which I came into with knowledge of the subject matter because I listened to a podcast episode about them years ago. In this case: 99% Invisible, 2018.

60. The Running Man dir. Edgar Wright

I wrote about this for The Long Walk but Stephen King is actually not good at this kind of storytelling, so the fact that it’s also being brought to life by maybe my least favorite director of all time set off a million warning bells.

While the satirical elements of this did little for me, it’s still big and bawdy enough that it met a baseline level of entertainment. I’m not sure this is particularly smart or insightful about the future of our society, but I didn’t mind spending an evening with Glen Powell to figure out what happened next.

Ridiculously silly ending.

59. The Long Walk dir. Francis Lawrence

Pretty bang-up little movie. If you're familiar with King's work, a political commentary this overt will worry you. He tends to be a blunt writer, and that surfaces here, mostly in the opening and closing minutes as Hamill is stinking up the joint. Fortunately, the film allows the middle 90% of the movie to rely on the central metaphor and not so much state its worldview. It results in a sufficiently gnarly, propulsive movie that does well toeing the line between social statement and cinematic adventure.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are great, though Jonsson is doing some of the most bizarre accent work I've ever seen.

58. Drop dir. Christopher Landon

Exactly like every other successful, high-concept Blumhouse thriller: Perfectly entertaining and delivering what it promises, yet it's also it's hard not to think about the fact that an inspired director could pretty easily elevate this 3-star to a 4-star.

Though Landon did work a Saab 9-3 into this so I must concede he knows ball.

57. TRON: Ares dir. Joachim Rønning

This movie has a Gary Vee cameo and features, in its central character, an AI Christ figure portrayed by Jared Leto whom, for some reason, also develops a stilted and hard-to-believe romantic dalliance with Greta Lee.

This movie also has light bikes, fighter jets, a really cool scene set in “an ‘80s server,” and an absolutely rollicking Nine Inch Nails score.

This movie is objectively uncool. And yet there’s also a lot of cool stuff in it. Maybe the coolest uncool movie ever.

56. Together dir. Michael Shanks

Fascinating movie, as I'm not sure I've ever seen such a significant gap between narrative and theme. Pretty smart and entertaining as a movie about marriage. Pretty stupid as a movie about these two people, and this relationship.

(Very disorienting to watch this the day after I watched Oh, Hi!––a very similar kind of movie with the exact inverse problem.)

55. The Smashing Machine dir. Benny Safdie

I actually think this is a fairly brave film. The Safdies have made it clear that they know how to make a movie feel like a lit stick of dynamite, and applying that ethos to a story about a fighter staring down the barrel of time and addiction would've been slick, fun, and easy. Instead, this is very downbeat, earning the comparisons to the brothers' brilliant and depressing documentary, Lenny Cooke. The Rock really does disappear into this character, and Safdie has turned a relatively cookie-cutter career turn into something that actually is fairly surprising and bold. This is not a popcorn flick or something that strives for satisfaction, and I'd imagine that's what viewers coming for a UFC movie, or The Rock superstardom, will get hung up on.

But for me, the issue comes in the structure. Watching this, I found it impossible to shake the idea that it only exists as a Serious Acting Showcase for The Rock. That's perfectly fine, and many great movies have come from similar game plans. But the trouble comes from the fact that the film could not be structured any more like your standard biopic. This is a character study jammed into a pretty rigid narrative structure, which leaves you with vanishingly little to grip on to. It kinda felt like the whole thing never really got going.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the stuff that actually works best here is not the biopic elements (which are pretty flat) or the acting showcase (which is pretty good) but the first-act stuff that serves as a pretty effective portrait of addiction. But relatively little time is devoted to that stuff, in favor of fight scenes and flat supporting characters.

54. One of Them Days dir. Lawrence Lamont

Keke Palmer is a superstar, and we're not doing nearly enough with her. She's got this movie on her back, with an assist from Katt Williams. (!)

53. Presence dir. Steven Soderbergh

Takes the classic haunted house tropes and yanks them inside out, making it an experience less about sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next jump scare and more about feeling that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. The story's got a really effective black cloud hanging over it––a family strained and stressed and depressive, while only the audience is aware that something even worse must be coming.

And yet the climax isn't able to really meet the muster. This is a ton of fun as a formal exercise from a director in his lunch pail era, and eventually pretty inert as a piece of narrative storytelling.

52. Sacramento dir. Michael Angarano

Michael Cera has been in the game so long that he's now in his second wave of late-2000s Fox Searchlight indie comedies. The pros and cons are exactly the same as they were 15 years ago: This is very funny and also contains zero emotional surprises, or really much complexity at all.

51. The Gorge dir. Scott Derrickson

Fun, gnarly stuff. It's what Spiderhead should've been a few years ago.

I think the real trick here is the way this sets itself up as a cloistered mystery––maybe like a sci-fi-tinted Rear Window––before a turn towards junk survival shoot-em-up type stuff that I genuinely did not see coming. Would've been fun in a theater, but not sure anyone would've seen it. In that sense, it's kind of the ideal streamer. It's dumb, but it's the exciting, adventurous kind.

50. Superman dir. James Gunn

One of those movies that's just good enough to make me irritated by its flaws. I think Gunn nailed down a lot of trickier elements (tone, style, worldview of the character) but wasn't able to escape the comic book movie slog that eventually made me give up entirely on the MCU more than a decade ago. I can stomach the CGI sensory overload climax, I can handle an antagonist that spends the entire movie in a single room, I can even look past Ted Lasso-ing Superman. But can we just make a movie that exists within itself and doesn't feel like a sales pitch for what the creator hopes will be a $25 billion enterprise? I admire the film's ethics, but it's not enough to paper over a lot of the same flaws I find in any of these movies.

But when it works, it works. So much of the "boring" domestic stuff is great, and I wish the movie saved more space to explore Corenswet and Brosnahan's chemistry or the farm in Kansas and devoted less time to pocket universes. I used to feel like the MCU ran in fear of all this stuff (and for very good reason), but this movie really starts to sing in those interstitial moments and could've used more of them.

Cleveland and Cincinnati both look great (an entire scene at Progressive Field!), but the single most shocking twist of the film is the Noah and the Whale needle drop. What an absolutely surreal choice for someone with my music taste in 2008.

49. Final Destination Bloodlines dir. Adam B. Stein & Zach Lipovsky

I've only seen one (though likely two and possibly as many as three) of these movies, so take this with a grain of salt, but as someone with a begrudging respect for franchise filmmaking and "legasequels," I was interested from the start. This is the sixth film of the series, and as such, the brilliant conceit is old by now, but here's an entry that does a pretty impressive job reviving and expanding upon it in fascinating ways. It's truly a model for how to write a new branch onto an old tree, successfully reheating the franchise for a new generation––dark humor, grisly kills, and all.

I just wish it didn't look like absolute garbage while doing so. One of the reasons the first film is so fun is the phenomenal mood it sets. This is comparatively artless. (Though credit the decision to overload some of the production budget into the climax.)

48. Splitsville dir. Michael Angelo Covino

Dakota Johnson, whom I adore, has appeared in a second 2025 movie that takes a unique angle on modern relationships and whiffs. No movie has ever been more clearly starring its director/writers, and I think it helps contribute to the same kind of uncanny valley feeling I got from Materialists. This just did not really work for me at all as a relationship movie.

Fortunately, it has humor to fall back on, and it's really funny, delivering a handful of legitimately great jokes and toting along some more screwball, slapstick comedy, if that's your thing. I almost feel it would've succeeded better if it had just sustained the absurdity throughout, because the air went out every time the film tried leading me back to The Serious Parts.

47. Eternity dir. David Freyne

A high-concept rom-com that doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny but kinda gets the job done regardless. This exact kind of movie is somewhat of a recurring theme in 2025: Splitsville, Together, and Oh, Hi! each fit this bill. Pretty good movies. I’ll never watch them again.

Forced to choose, Eternity is probably my favorite of the bunch. Don’t look too closely or you’ll start to notice some of the flaws here (a movie starring a woman that’s unquestionably about two men; a story that reduces her to a one-dimensional object of desire) but it’s also pretty cute as far as these things go. Though maybe I’m just a hopeless wife guy.

46. Hamnet dir. Chloé Zhao

Well-performed (my favorite Buckley since I'm Thinking of Ending Things) and very well-made. This certainly has the shape and feel of a Best Picture contender.

But the entire narrative conceit did nothing for me. The film puts a lot of its chips on a closing scene that banks on you buying the aforementioned conceit, and I found that a lot less engaging than the first two acts, which observe a harsh life, a deep love, and frankly have nothing to do with the fact that dad is Shakespeare.

45. After the Hunt dir. Luca Guadagnino

Didn't hate this, but found it pretty frustrating as a case of a director using a kitchen full of incredible ingredients and creating a meal less interesting and satisfying than I thought possible. For how much this has working in its favor––incredible cast, score, and photography to arrive at, broadly, Tár via The Social Network––this ends up just feeling like being lectured by an old person who doesn't get it and doesn't care to learn.

Otherwise, yeah, I'd love to spend an autumn in New Haven going to parties, eating Indian food, and listening to jazz with Julia and Ayo.

44. Flight Risk dir. Mel Gibson

Hilarious, tense, and an absolute blast. I went in sorta prepped to enjoy this, and it actually exceeded my expectations––a true blue Netflix (or maybe TNT?) junk thriller, projected on AMC's "Big D" screen. What a novel experience. It feels like an accident that this got a wide release on premium screens.

The "DIRECTED BY MEL GIBSON" credits drop is a laugh line unto itself, and considering how hard they worked to hide him in marketing materials, it's hilarious to imagine how many moviegoers will not find out he directed this until that moment.

Virtually the entirety of the lean runtime is spent in the fuselage of a small plane as Wahlberg spits out absurd dialogue and Topher Grace (wonderfully cast) cowers in handcuffs. It's everything I want from January.

43. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie dir. Peter Browngardt

Gorgeous and hilarious––just exuberant filmmaking. I rarely think about it, but I grew up on animation that was almost exclusively hand-drawn, and it's easy to forget, in 2025, the potential of the art form. I had so many "Oh yeah, cartoons used to do that" moments while watching this. Hardly my favorite movie of the year, but definitely one of the most joyful.

42. Baby Invasion dir. Harmony Korine

I'm too old to know if this is still the case, but there was a time when way-too-online 16-year-olds were basically forced to watch Kids. And Spring Breakers came out when I was 20––a relatively small blip in the zeitgeist but a wide-spanning ripple on the internet I occupied in 2013.

Suffice it to say, I will always be in the bag for Harmony and his BS, even the bad stuff. I think he's always made movies specifically for those who speak his language, but I also think it's safe to say that his work has never been more insular. I wouldn't recommend Aggro Dr1ft or Baby Invasion to a single person, though the latter is awfully hypnotizing.

At some point soon, Blumhouse is going to make a completely overbuilt and artistically bankrupt movie satirizing how it feels to live in this current moment, but Harmony's got his finger on the pulse right here. In 2013, the internet was a sea of social media feeds––Tumblr, Twitter––self-soothing to hollow vibes and curated aesthetics. Now it's all just an unending web of slop-tier live streams––TikTok, Twitch, StreamEast––atop whirring comment sections filled with AI bots or 11-year-olds with deep-fried synapses.

I don't think this is a particularly smart movie, nor do I think it wants to be seen as one. But it does feel right.

41. The Naked Gun dir. Akiva Schaffer

"UCLA?" "I see it every day, I live here!"

As someone who watched Airplane! when he was too young, I was predisposed to love this.

40. Reflection in a Dead Diamond dir. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani

A bit much for me, but undeniable to a certain extent in its singular vision and novel approach to a life on screen, deconstructed. Never really seen anything like it; one of the coolest-looking things of 2025.

39. The Ballad of Wallis Island dir. James Griffiths

Simple... But more well-made/heartfelt/funny than you're expecting, which makes it hard to resist its charms. Tim Key shoulders it. Kind of ambivalent about the other two performances.

38. Counting Crows: Have You Seen Me Lately? dir. Amy Scott

Less of a movie about Counting Crows than it is about Adam Duritz and his first two albums, which I personally find a lot more interesting than the band writ large. It’s a cool document of the ‘90s and fame, which are things I’ve certainly seen on screen before, but Duritz is uniquely positioned to talk about a different strand of that: making great music and getting super successful but ultimately never being taken seriously and never feeling at home in your own skin.

I love those two albums and I’m glad to get these people and stories on the record.

37. Caught by the Tides dir. Jia Zhangke

Maybe less than the sum of its parts, but also the parts are still extremely cool. Great music movie. Great cinematography movie. Great movie about being left uneasy in the wake of a country rocketing in an uncertain direction. Admittedly, I would probably better appreciate this movie, cobbled together from Jia's previous work, if I'd seen any of it before this. (lol)

36. Hallow Road dir. Babak Anvari

Some real sick stuff here. If you've seen any of these hyper-contained movies, you'll be familiar with some of these moves, but Anvari plays really well in this sandbox, stacking some clever filmmaking flourish on top of Rhys and Pike––a couple of real back-for-your-buck performers.

This is the exact movie you hope you're getting when you hear "80-minute thriller set almost entirely in a car."

35. Relay dir. David Mackenzie

I've always lumped David Mackenzie into a group with Jeremy Saulnier. These are dudes who, almost as a matter of fact, make thrifty little genre movies with a reserved slot in my annual Best Under-Seen Movies list. Mackenzie in particular excels at imbuing this kind of low-brow stuff with a strain of Greek tragedy. Hell or High Water is a bank robber movie that feels like it carries the weight of the world on its shoulders.

Relay is not as good. The performances falter, the script is underbaked, and the production generally seems tackier. And yet the guy still knows how to stage a movie, so I was just completely glued to the screen for the entire runtime, even as the cracks began to show. He's got Michael Clayton meets The Conversation going here––two of my very favorite movies. And it turns out even the straight-to-DVD version of that is pretty exciting.

Laundering communications through a public relay service is a brilliant movie invention. One of the most "Pretty Good, I Recommend Checking It Out" movies in years.

34. Nouvelle Vague dir. Richard Linklater

Enjoyed this much more than I expected to. I questioned what the point was, but watch the movie, and it won't take long to see that this is much less about Breathless or Jean-Luc Godard than it is simply a love letter to the act of directing––of creation. It's quite impressively made (I found myself occasionally forgetting this was a contemporary film), but it almost feels like Linklater is hustling through these elaborate recreations to get to lovingly composed shots of Godard sitting next to a camera.

And if you do really care about this movie and this director, you're still in the right spot. Guillaume Marbeck is awesome and successfully portrays Godard not as a savant but rather a kind-of-full-of-crap scoundrel running on ego and once-in-a-generation instinct.

33. Sorry, Baby dir. Eva Victor

Almost like a midpoint between Reichardt and Gerwig, and being able to successfully pull off that limbo is the film's superpower. A first-time director having the nimbleness to downshift from funny to scary, sad, or uncomfortable is impressive––especially when she's the one in front of the camera as well.

Hedges and Lynch are a pair of intentionally "bring your relationships to the performers with you" casting choices, and you know what? Not mad about it.

32. Avatar: Fire and Ash dir. James Cameron

The Avatar movies are spectacle-first, but The Way of Water managed to meld form and function in a surprising way. Fire and Ash is an unfortunate return to the muddled narrative. Each act here has an uproarious set piece or two, but, on the whole, I found this pretty messy and hard to fall for, too often feeling like the previous film, but worse.

31. Roofman dir. Derek Cianfrance

Any real Cianfrance Heads (read: devotees of The Place Beyond the Pines, a forgotten masterpiece of the 2010s!) will enjoy his hallmarks here. There aren't just the troupe cameos (Emory Cohen and Ben Mendelsohn, my dear homies), but more excitingly, his eye for finding beauty in the drab minutiae of suburban America and his skills at rendering procedural crime as something grippingly tactile and real. The brief bits of chicanery on screen are so wonderfully realized, and its sense of place is enthralling. I found it hard not to think of The Florida Project––this portrait of life not just in the margins but directly in the shadows of American capitalism.

But I also think those same Cianfrance Heads know the guy has the chops to really get things humming and will be slightly frustrated in the ways I was. This is decidedly downbeat, making the moments that flirted with rip-roaring action or bleeding-heart emotionality feel a bit like a tease. Take the top off, Derek!

By the end, he does bring it home, though. In a year chock full of good-not-great movies, this is near the right side of the bell curve. There's a lot of talent on screen and behind the scenes. I just wish he threw it into third or fourth gear.

30. The Phoenician Scheme dir. Wes Anderson

Lesser Wes for me, but a byproduct of auteur theory states this will inevitably be some people's favorite. The cast is great (Cera gives an all-time Anderson performance), but it feels like an intentional return to the stripped-back––a little bit of a bummer as someone who loved the brick-dense, labyrinthine nature of French Dispatch and Asteroid City.

29. Mickey 17 dir. Bong Joon Ho

At the end of the day, Bong's just a dude who loves some creatures.

He's been fascinated with them since 2006's The Host, a movie I find charming despite how crude the CGI was. 2017's Okja saw some improved creatures, even if that charm waned. But four Oscars can buy a lot of visual effects. This movie has an $118 million budget, and you can see every penny of it. Looks awesome. I can't believe we got a blockbuster-sized Bong movie. Enjoy it, because it's not coming back.

Even more than Bong loves creatures, he loves a social commentary. Moviegoers love them recently too, which has been frustrating for me as someone who does not. Fortunately, Mickey 17 kind of glides past my defenses by being mostly pretty doughy and rollicking, rather than of the more offensive ilk: the blunt and preachy (i.e., Don't Look Up) or the prodding and obnoxious (i.e., Triangle of Sadness).

I'm actually glad this isn't very sharp, because it would be less enjoyable if it were. Don't think about it too hard (and plug your nose during some of the odorous Ruffalo scenes), and this is plenty fun. A big-ass Bong film, starring a big-ass movie star.

28. The Shrouds dir. David Cronenberg

“I lived in her body. Her body was the only place I really lived."

I keep returning to Cronenberg despite the fact that I haven't found a single film of his to love, and I think it's because so little pressure exists for me as the viewer. I enter so many movies bound up by hope and expectation, and I don't experience that with any of his films, and since they're so weird, it creates a wild, uncanny experience that I can't find anywhere else. I can easily sit with them, and I think it makes me more receptive to their intellectual ideas, even if I rarely find much of his work emotionally resonant.

But this one feels deeply personal for obvious reasons, and his icky and uncomfortable rumination on physical absence is kind of gobsmacking in a certain never-seen-this-before kind of way. It's stilted and lo-fi and sometimes hilarious in ways I'm not sure it always intends to be, and there's this incessant conspiratorial plot that I found kind of annoying, but otherwise this is very strangely... romantic? I have thankfully never experienced this kind of grief, but I think anyone who's been with one person for a prolonged period of time will find an emotional wavelength to connect on. We've gotten some effective and probing movies about marriage recently, and here's another one.

27. Friendship dir. Andrew DeYoung

"Whoa, big lick."

Almost narratively incoherent, feels just like most of Tim Robinson’s stuff, there were a few chapters I could’ve just done without, etc.

You’re going into this movie for a laugh, and it delivers. My packed theater was on fire. The best laugh-a-minute comedy in years.

26. Eephus dir. Carson Lund

"You can't call it now, the whole game would be pointless." "It was already pointless, fellas."

Slow and melancholic and funny and dissatisfying and beautiful and bittersweet. And idiosyncratic. Like baseball.

It's a movie for baseball obsessives, but specifically for those who played the game. And I think it might be the best at capturing all that means since Sandlot. Definitely need a rewatch, but I know I'll get plenty of those. This is going in the canon.

25. Black Bag dir. Steven Soderbergh

Went into this knowing nothing aside from its director ("if it's Sodes, I goes") and was delighted to find out that the master of the thrifty 3.5 movie for adults has reached slightly deeper for what's maybe his best movie since... Logan Lucky? Side Effects? I love the guy, but this is the first film of his in a long while that feels like it's aspiring for more.

I guess a lot of that can be directly attributed to its cast. Blanchett and Fassbender are real-deal heavy hitters, and here they're joined by a supporting cast of far lesser-known players who acquit themselves beautifully––Burke and Abela especially.

But the sales pitch here is the script and its themes. On top of being a fully capable spy thriller lurking inside of a murder mystery frame, it's a movie about marriage for married people. Almost (almost!) some Phantom Thread vibes here: Matrimony as a dangerous, nasty, and illogical but ultimately romantic enterprise.

24. Die My Love dir. Lynne Ramsay

Another successful but decidedly unromantic movie about marriage! Lawrence is outstanding and spends each daylight moment running a gauntlet of agitation, both auditory––crying baby, barking dogs, buzzing insects, and a hand-selected list of the most annoying music of all time––and more physical in the form of a lousy partner played by a believably dirtbag Robert Pattinson. But the film spreads its wings in nighttime scenes that feel like someone's resurrected Night of the Hunter DP Stanley Cortez. They're these kinds of barely visible sequences of psychosexual intensity to contrast the rot of daily life.

And no movie about splintering into a million pieces in the middle of the country would be complete without Sissy Spacek. She's the secret sauce, and her final scene kind of coalesces the entire movie.

This is very clearly directed by a woman, written by women, and based on a book by another woman, and I expect this will make it something relatable for women and a horror movie for the fellas. It's throwing a lot at the wall. Not all of it sticks. And it doesn't seem to quite know how to make an ending, so it tries out a few. It's hardly enjoyable or entertaining in the conventional sense, but I found this so thoroughly discomfiting that it's impossible not to respect it. More upsetting than most horror movies I've seen recently.

23. Twinless dir. James Sweeney

I found this kinda silly and completely, wholly effective. The script––which I actually think is very good––may be implausible and carry a little bit of a YA page-turner vibe, which I don't love, but I think you can get away with that when the film is buoyed by great performances (Dylan O'Brien, the best I've ever seen him) and awesome characters. These are flawed, nuanced, annoying people, and I kinda wish I knew them all in real life.

Sweeney clearly pored over this. Really thoughtfully made. There's a little bit of a Cooper Raiff thing here in that I'm more than fine overlooking some shortcomings because I think he's so clearly got the juice.

22. The Baltimorons dir. Jay Duplass

What a charmer! Feels like a transmission from the late 2000s indie scene (a compliment coming from this 33-year-old) in the way it shows up the party with zero stars and zero budget but is just mustering by on cozy charisma and and a neat little screenplay.

There’s a real chemistry between these two, but Michael Strassner, being the star and screenwriter, is the winner here. I feel like 2025 has been short on true surprises, which makes this even more lovely.

21. Bugonia dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Plemons is absolutely dialed in, and it's impossible not to admire the fact that one of the biggest actresses in Hollywood is totally game to do this. Looks great, plenty upsetting, lots of dark humor, targets something increasingly apparent about the fraying fringes of the furthest reaches of both the upper and lower classes.

But, like all of Lanthimos' post-Sacred Deer work, it falls in a like-not-love category for me, though admittedly at the top of that heap. I find his work either failing to fully close the loop (such as here) or closing it and beating you senseless in the process (such as in Poor Things). I'm grateful we have him, regardless.

20. Cloud dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

As much about grindset leeches who contribute nothing to society and who yearn for nothing but more money as it is about internet warfare and how stupid and petty it all feels when it inevitably escapes the screen. Pretty funny that this finally reached American theaters, only to intersect with Eddington, a film that captures a lot of the “internet dumbasses play army men in the streets” mayhem.

Kurosawa’s technical chops, being some of the best in the world, make this really sing. He knows exactly when to abide by convention and exactly when to subvert it, while making both approaches equally successful. It makes this quite tense and ominous when it isn’t laugh-out-loud funny in the same way Aster’s film is.

19. Weapons dir. Zach Cregger

To call Cregger's films horror-comedies would sell short his steady hand with both brushes. What they feel like instead is "popcorn elevated horror." He can craft the sheen of prestige and bring along the Big Ideas of his peers (don't let anyone tell you this movie is about nothing), but he's primarily driving at pure, unbridled entertainment––a great time at the movies. But even aping or playfully gesturing at terror, when done well, is scary! A lot of this put me on edge. It's a great way to tee up the jokes, so for a second film in a row, Cregger is able to have his cake and eat it, too.

As someone who came to like horror movies almost singularly through the "elevated horror" era, this is what threw me for a loop leaving the theater after seeing Barbarian. It's funny to go back and read that first review, as I tried desperately to crack open and pick apart a movie that is simply Spooky And Exciting And Fun To Think About. (To throw a stray, I think Longlegs is attempting to run the same playbook, to ill effect. All mood, no substance, no fun.)

Weapons is cut from the same cloth. Through these last two features, Cregger has shown a Peele-esque ability to make some fairly sophisticated filmmaking seem simple––a director tearing out of the starting blocks with a distinctive voice and confident approach. He's growing as a director. His debut had the benefit of surprise and, as a result, may boast a more memorable theatrical experience, but the sophomore effort is better. He's good enough that I can already feel myself getting anxious about making it all the way. I need Cregger's version of a masterpiece, but for now, I'm teaching myself to just enjoy the fun.

18. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning dir. Christopher McQuarrie

A movie that feels like it's running in quicksand for the first hour, trying to dig itself out of a mound of necessary exposition and buckling under the weight of its own canon. It's Ethan Hunt's Dark Knight Rises. It's not in the conversation for the series' best, and not even in that upper tier, but I enjoyed it a whole lot. And like Nolan's Batman finale, I wouldn't be shocked at all if I returned a decade later and found all that exposition, mythos, and self-aggrandizing kind of charming and nostalgic. Unlike its immediate predecessor, I think this one will grow on me.

Not sure what all the fuss was about! A perfectly satisfying finale.

Also, my god, that submarine sequence. And also, my god, that plane sequence. They put all their money in two major set pieces and made 'em count.

17. F1 dir. Joseph Kosinski

Maybe I'm just getting older, but I've got such a growing appreciation for cinematic traditionalism. I can't live without the directors that stretch and pull on what the medium is capable of, but I'm also desperate for big blockbusters that don't try to reinvent the wheel and instead realize it's still pretty awesome if you can make the wheel spin faster than hell.

These movies––Creed and Top Gun: Maverick are some recent examples––are really predictable and hit the blockbuster stereotypes, but I never find myself caring.

F1 is not as good as either of those movies, which were the type to grow on me after I left the theater and continued to marvel at their simple elegance and airtight, satisfying narratives. This, for one, lacks their throbbing emotional core, but it meets the challenge in sheer volume and adrenaline. Do I have questions about some of the shaggier plot lines? Yeah. Could it have used maybe one more top-line actor? Yeah. But Brad Pitt still has all the juice, and Kosinski, god bless him, has become one of the best at making me want to pump my fist in a crowded movie theater.

16. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You dir. Mary Bronstein

There's a really easy surface-level comparison to be made to the work of the Safdies or even someone like Sean Baker, but for how much of this can pretty cleanly map onto other things, I found it wholly unique in the lengths it's willing to go to in demand of sympathy and empathy.

It makes a kind of backwards sense but I never would've arrived there on my own: The more dire and surreal and extreme the circumstance, the more we're willing to accept Rose Byrne (excellent, by the way) having the worst week of her life, and therefore this frenetic, batshit filmmaking style actually has the right climate to foster a really great movie about how hard it is to be a mother. And, in that way, it could only be directed by a mother.

I gotta see more from Bronstein because I think there are real chops here that I worry some people are going to overlook due to an aesthetic framework we've seen before and a couple grabby casting choices.

15. The Mastermind dir. Kelly Reichardt

Of a piece with Showing Up in that it's a director typically masterful at movies about relationships (or at least contrasts between characters) drawing a portrait of loneliness. Showing Up's Michelle Williams is a woman operating in dedication, sacrifice, and perseverance for her art. Here, Josh O'Connor is, I suppose, a kind of artist as well––a methodical thief without much of a plan, clearly at the wash-out stage of whatever he was aiming for, and seeing the consequences take him over.

We all love filmmakers who reinvent themselves, but I also really love those who don't. Reichardt continues to kind of whittle in on similar themes and tones. Her films have progressively gotten even more subtle and nuanced as a result. She's a filmmaker who does soft and quiet better than almost anyone, and this film might be her softest and quietest, which means it's not gonna win her many new fans. But I really, really enjoyed it. She continues to bring a new definition to how we use the term "world-building."

14. Caught Stealing dir. Darren Aronofsky

Rocks a lot. It's refreshing to see Aronofsky (finally) turning his skills on something a little airier. Frankly, same goes for Butler, who is really great here. He's appeared in bigger movies, of course, but this is the most I've been impressed with his star quality. Make this exact same movie with a replacement-level actor, and I'm not sure it's one of my favorites of the year. This cast is good, but he's got this thing on his back.

Pairs well with Moneyball––movies about aging losers trying to get back on track, motivated by promising baseball careers that never came to fruition. The 2002 A's lost the ALDS. The 1998 Giants lost the Wild Card tiebreaker. There's more to life than baseball, he says to himself.

13. Train Dreams dir. Clint Bentley

“The world’s an old place. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.”

Clearly Malick-indebted and therefore I think a certain type of viewer might reject its operatic nature, its melodramatic voiceover, its built-for-Cinematography-Twitter way of shooting. I am not one of those people; I found it rattling. Though it may veer from Terry's style by injecting a fully formed plot, it's right out of his playbook in taking a small, relatively meaningless story and assigning it the weight of the world and shooting it like it's the only thing that matters.

Edgerton––who has very quietly become one of my favorites over the last several years––is stellar.

Every year, there's a movie I really like that, over a couple repeat visits, turns into a movie I really love. I think this could be 2025's.

12. Jay Kelly dir. Noah Baumbach

It feels like Baumbach has expanded in scope and ambition in his last two films and I'm not sure he's any better for it, but I think it at least suits the material here. This is a movie about a movie star, so Baumbach traverses the world, yet it's ultimately another one of his stories about broken relationships.

All of that globetrotting spins up more than a few narrative threads that I'm not sure made much sense or served the film as a whole, but I still found this all emotionally true and pretty devastating. If you're one of the many Sandler truthers (like I am) and one of the few Clooney truthers (like I am) you'll be pleased, as the pair are fantastic and can more than bear the weight of getting this shaggy bit of work over the finish line.

Two of my very favorite guys reading dialogue by one of my very favorite writers. Of course I loved it.

11. Blue Moon dir. Richard Linklater

"I went directly from childhood to washed up."

Ethan Hawke acolytes, this is our Super Bowl. I could listen to this guy read the newspaper, so getting to spend 100 minutes with him tearing through a great screenplay almost singlehandedly is a treat, and this one's smart, funny, sad, nuanced, intimate, unexpected, and on and on. Brings the same style of downbeat warmth as my favorite Christmas movies.

10. Lurker dir. Alex Russell

Almost Famous meets The Talented Mr. Ripley, but about Odd Future. It's a thriller built around cringe and discomfort that also serves as a pretty spot-on sketch of internet fame and clout chasing in what feels like the Tumblr era (again, Odd Future). The aesthetic timeline means I've met all these dudes and probably even acted like a couple at some point circa 2010.

I got a couple good recommendations for this, and it still managed to be the best surprise of the year thus far. It's an incredible debut––one that, funnily enough, actually reminds me of what Odd Future felt like 15 years ago. "Oh wow, the new guy's got the bull by the horns." This feels borne out of lived experience and therefore really knows what it's trying to channel. It gets there by really effective casting and cinematography. Perhaps most quietly impressive, the fake pop music within the movie passes the smell test. That's almost never the case.

What a breath of fresh air.

09. 28 Years Later dir. Danny Boyle

A perfect movie for anyone looking for Hollywood's largest prosthetic organ and an absolutely soul-splitting rumination on the necessity of making peace with death when forced to live in a society saturated with it.

Having watched the first two films in the series, it's clear to me that this is a director forcefully reclaiming the material. While 28 Weeks Later is plenty serviceable as a junk thriller, Boyle's return to the franchise is the follow-up we needed, breaking up the splatter by training scuzzy cameras on some of the most beautiful vistas you've ever seen.

I guess I can't call this better than the original. It's less inventive, but I think it's actually more affecting––marking perhaps the first time Boyle's emotional ideas have squared me up. It's gory and strange and sometimes silly. It also packs in the ideas of a much larger, more prestigious movie. And Alfie Williams is just stellar.

08. Highest 2 Lowest dir. Spike Lee

"All money ain't good money."

Adored this. I kinda feel like you have to if you love Spike and Denzel. It's less about adapting the original than it is about lassoing it––taking Kurosawa's film and bolting on (however clumsily/charmingly) Spike's view of the world from the back nine. It's a story about the importance and unimportance of money, and it's a story about chasing your passions and protecting the game at 70, made by a couple guys doing the same.

It packs in two or three of my favorite sequences of the year.

07. Sinners dir. Ryan Coogler

"See, white folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don't like the people who make it."

Big, messy, and bawdy, achieving liftoff at just the right moment. Its status as a true-blue vampire movie means it's not quite my thing, but it's still so clearly a major motion picture. The rare films that stand the test of time and serve as culture markers are just like this––original (using this loosely) stories at the intersection of critical cred and major pop appeal. The list of such movies from this decade is vanishingly short: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Nope... Anora? Challengers? Coogler's in rare air. Give the man whatever he wants because he's one of the few directors the future of this stuff is riding on at the moment.

Shout out to Delroy Lindo. Love that Coogler is breaking free from Marvel. Gotta get MBJ in more stuff.

06. Sentimental Value dir. Joachim Trier

The screenplay felt a touch too neat (contrived?) to really get me riding its wave, but it more than makes up for it with its performances and a general melancholic beauty that still feels real and lived-in. I haven't been so convinced of a film’s environment since Tár––a real compliment.

The actors are able to sell a real depth that may not even exist in the screenplay, but I found myself waiting for a narrative or emotional surprise that ultimately never came, which is a bit of a shame because everything else––the acting, the music, the cinematography––is some of the very best of 2025.

05. Wake Up Dead Man dir. Rian Johnson

"I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that's profoundly true?"

A whodunnit that's carved out enough of the "Who done it?" to allow space for a wholly different question: "Is it possible to see God through the corruption of the church and all of the people in it?" We don't get many swerves this bold on threequels, and I expect it's going to miff a lot of people all across the spectrum. I cannot believe this is what Rian Johnson Trojan-horsed into a Knives Out movie. It's audacious, maybe even foolish, and carried entirely by a stellar Josh O'Connor performance. I'm kind of stunned.

One of the best surprises of the year. I'm dying to hear Johnson talk about it.

04. It Was Just An Accident dir. Jafar Panahi

Unfortunately, my first Panahi. What little I know of his work I understand to be pretty unique and challenging, so I love the way in which this feels like it was made to be released by Neon on a bunch of screens. It's a tight little package that bundles up some thorny ideas and delivers them with a steady grasp of tone. It feels totally in league with all of the studio's recent "prestige" releases: Sentimental Value, Anora, La chimera, Anatomy of a Fall, etc.

And yet "fits right in with the Neon slate" really undersells what a superb piece of work this is. I find it so easy to fawn over deeply human stories I've never seen before, and this one takes a tale of revenge and swings it back and forth across that oscillating tone. This mystery becomes a thriller before it becomes a slapstick caper before it becomes a feel-good found family movie before it downshifts into something darker and more brilliantly nuanced––a recursive look at how revenge is both wickedly corrosive and helplessly pointless. The very last scene is easy to flip for, but it's the extended one just before it that knocked me out.

And it's doing all of this, by the way, absolutely gorgeously. This screenplay is not one inherently ripe for visual flourish and yet this is a simply beautiful film.

And it's a staggering statement, especially one coming from this particular filmmaker.

03. Eddington dir. Ari Aster

I exist in what I assume will continue to be a pretty narrow center-section of this film's target audience Venn diagram. It's a big, torrential downpour of a movie––a 2.5-hour freakout about what it was (is?) like to live in the scariest and stupidest era of a scary, stupid country.

It's kinda weird to watch something of a historical drama about not just something that I lived through, but something that I participated in, as we all did. And I think Aster has correctly located that you can triangulate almost everything about this country by pointing a magnifying glass at those few months when it felt like American life got shot with adrenaline.

(I find Scorsese's glowing review very interesting after seeing the film, as it feels surprisingly in concert with Killers of the Flower Moon––not just the Native American stuff but as an exegesis on the complete absurdity of greed and selfishness and paranoia and violence we've constructed as the American experiment.)

It's not a perfect movie, and plenty have been extremely critical of that imperfection, but it's just got way too many brilliant ideas for me not to fall for it, and I predict history will eventually be kind. It made me laugh. It made me sad. It made me feel seen.

02. Marty Supreme dir. Josh Safdie

”If he’s so committed, why’d he stop the scene? Why didn't he punch his hand through the screen and unlock it from the other side? Right? That’s what I woulda done.”

Timmy started his Marty Supreme work, at least publicly, on that SAG Award stage back in February with a speech some found charming, and others found rankling. A recent interview clip I saw with Josh Safdie (sorry, can’t remember where) revealed that the speech apparently came moments after a phone call with Safdie himself. One can’t help but wonder how much the character of Marty Mauser was on Chalamet’s mind when he stood in front of the mic that night. To see the setup pay off, eight months later, feels a lot like seeing Marty Supreme connect from the opening credits to the closing shot––a high-arcing bullseye.

The Safdies have always made these movies about high-risk, win-at-all-costs, one-track-mind egomaniacs. The world, especially America, is full of these types. One could argue too full. (At least one of these types literally appears in this movie.) But in Mauser, and in the wake of parenthood, Safdie has settled on a softer subject for his archetype in a Chalamet character who takes uncalculated risks that leave a wake of destruction but, like the guy on the SAG stage, is ultimately kind of boyishly charming and earnest enough to win you over.

This is a monster of a movie and what feels like another rubber-stamping for both Safdie (firmly one of the best American directors working) and Chalamet (the guy might take over the world). There are just too many nooks and crannies to even digest on one go. The soundtrack! The Khondji photography! The Lopatin score! The Fisk design! The list of delightful little supporting performances. What a dazzling thing.

01. One Battle After Another dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

"Is it too late for us? After all my lies? Are you happy? Do you have love?"

I've been anticipating this movie to an unhealthy degree. There are a few directors whose films I just kinda watch every year, and PTA is in that group. But I've been intentionally saving all of his work because I knew this film was coming, and I wanted to rewatch the entire filmography fresh, in chronological order, leading up to release day.

If you do this, you'll discover that, generally speaking, his career can be divided into two phases. The first phase sees PTA placing those desperate for salvation, redemption, and connection in the center of sprawling pieces almost designed to vault their creator into the cinematic canon––an ambition I happen to find charming and fascinating. The second phase, which begins with Punch-Drunk Love, sees PTA working comparatively smaller and more internal, creating what are almost two-handers that find a pair of broken souls entering one another's orbit. I personally find this a bit less exciting (I suppose a personal flaw is that I like when my Great pieces of art state their intentions), though, when you binge 'em all, it's hard to deny that this is what PTA is best at.

I am not the first to point this out, but One Battle After Another feels an awful lot like these two phases, at long last, crossing paths. This is tremendously large and expansive, wielding a kind of scope and feverishly dense scale that harkens back to his earlier work. I think an (understandable) mistake made in the early reaction is thinking that this movie is revolutionary in its political ideas. Compared to the average nine-figure Warner Brothers movie, it may be, but I don't think this exists to instruct or inspire a revolution, it's just a movie set during a period of tumult while holding a mirror to our own.

Instead, this is a sprawling PTA movie hiding one of those relationship pieces inside of it––a real heartbreaking and heartwarming movie about a father and his daughter. It may critique and admonish the state of the world, but it cares much more to warn us about how quickly the years glide past, and to ask questions: What do we give to our children? What do we inflict upon them? What world are we bringing them into? And how have we equipped them to face it and maybe even change it?

PTA's got kids, and seeing him channel his powers towards them is frankly even more exciting than seeing him transpose generational craft onto a blockbuster flick. He had my heart racing. He had me gut laughing. But, far more surprisingly, he had me choking back tears at the final scene both times I saw it.

A special, special movie. The kind of movie you watch movies for.