Best Films of 2025
Hey. It’s time for the list of my favourite movies that came out last year (2025). I don’t have any thoughts about the year as a whole because despite the fact that it was undoubtedly Quite Bad and this year is already Worse, I am free from constant mental bombardment about how much everything sucks because last year I quit twitter. Within a couple months I was using bluesky as heavily as I ever used twitter, but it really Is Not The Same. Which is probably good honestly. But as a result I felt a bit unmoored from “current events” by which I mean the vortex of Stuff People Online Have Decided is Important – a lot of those things were important, but many more of them were not. And I’m free from that now. I’m spending that time reading and writing now, and I hope to keep that habit up for the foreseeable future.
Mathematically I watched fewer movies in 2025 than in 2024, (a casualty of me learning how to read), but I watched enough good ones to make up the difference on quality – numbers 11-20 on the 2025 list would be real contender’s on the 2024 list, but because they came out in 2025 you’ll NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY ARE (unless you check my letterboxd of course).
Away we go!
10. Caught by the Tides
A movie that was never in my top 10 at any point all year until December. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it! Andrei Tarkovsky famously said film is sculpting in time, and this is that. Going in, I didn’t know that the film was a collage of random handheld video footage taken across 20 years, outtakes from previous films, and new material folded together into a strange but resonant hodgepodge. Having seen the movie, that makes perfect sense. The first portion of the film is experimental and ambient. You see these little glimpses of people’s lives, intimacies that spark in and out, and the film is full of texture that you sit and marinate in. A sense of a place and a time. Though the movie eventually develops plotlines and even has a surreal encounter with a modern day robot amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s this ambient texture and this sense of another place, another time that’s stuck with me so strongly. This use of brief moments speckling a sprawling expanse of time creates a sense of enormous forces churning the present, creating history, leaving the people caught in its blades to live amongst them as best they can. Caught by the Tides has remained with me ever since I saw it, and I couldn’t in good conscience leave it off this list.
9. Sinners
Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler: still the dream team! I get the sense that it’s somewhat unfashionable now to admit that I was all the way in on Black Panther when it came out, but I will never be ashamed of loving Creed. God what a film. And I love Creed 2! I even like Creed 3. But I digress – going back to Fruitvale Station, these guys have made each other’s careers, and this movie feels like the moonshot. A real director who loves to work in genre alongside a real movie star, with real money behind them, with an original script at the center. I’ve been thinking of this movie since it came out as a modern-day John Carpenter movie, and I mean that unabashedly. It’s a big genre story idea delivered all out with a commitment to genre integrity and cinematic integrity.
The film does a great job of establishing and showing off its period setting, it has a ton of fun showing off the effects work and acting chops that go into creating Michael B. Jordan’s twin protagonists, and it has two extremely different but extremely good sequences of musical performance as magical, spiritual transcendence. It’s a little lower on the list than it could be because I feel like the actual payoff, the big action sequence at the end really doesn’t deliver. Maybe the bad fight at the end of Black Panther can’t entirely be put on the MCU’s shoulders, alas.
8. Blue Moon
Thank you to Richard Linklater for making this movie as an Oscar vehicle for your good buddy Ethan Hawke. I love this movie so much – what is a better, more appealing story than the story of the guy who was almost the other half of one of the biggest duos in history? To come so close, and to be replaced, defeated and devoured by your own demons, whether it’s the drinking or the neuroticism or simply being too much of an artist to write the slop that the masses crave. We spend this whole movie following around Lorenz Hart, played by an Ethan Hawke who has been shrunk through cinematic trickery into a wily stump of a middle-aged man in love with a beautiful young woman and overwhelmed by jealousy at the afterparty for the grand opening of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma (formerly Rogers and Hart).
Linklater tells stories and tries to wheedle work out of Andrew Scott as Rogers and falls all over himself trying to impress Qualley as the object of his desire. At some point during the night he gives E.B. White the idea for Stuart Little. Bobby Cannavale is the gruff but kind bartender! It’s a beautifully sad movie. Hawke is magnificent, he makes you love this guy, this doomed egotistical little man with so much talent but just as much pride and twice as many problems.
7. Bugonia
Yorgos made a nasty movie. This is not news to those of us who have been paying attention, after all Kinds of Kindness was an extremely nasty movie! Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone were in that one too! Bugonia is a comedy of horrors, a cynical bludgeoning of human existence in modernity, the decay of society, of reality itself. Yorgos seems to be poking at how some far right types and conspiracy theorists often come close to comprehending the truth of reality correctly, but then at the last moment they veer in the wrong direction, either because of ideology or sometimes a psychological need to fit the world into a certain shape. The defenders of children from pedophiles who worship Donald Trump, the refugee from vanishing blue-collar jobs who becomes fixated on race and gender instead of class. It’s a big cruel joke, and it’s at our expense. And sometimes that’s life.
6. Friendship
Tim Robinson is so good at playing the maniac. The man who seems so normal, but under the hood, some wire is just connected wrong. The little things just build up, bit by bit, until the true self cannot be contained and comes crashing out, like a raging wave, an anxiety nightmare of social disaster. What I like about this movie is so much of it is relatable in a deranged way. It’s the genius of the thing, you take the relatable impulse and you transpose it and amplify it to create a situation so incomprehensibly alien that no one could ever find themselves in it, and yet the base instinct is relatable. Take the way Robinson’s character Craig Waterman, after he’s been rejected by Paul Rudd’s Austin Carmichael, tries to recreate all the fun things they did together. Who among us hasn’t gone out to a new place with a friend, had a great time, and then later brought a different friend or a partner back to that place, making it your own? Well what if that activity was exploring tunnel networks, and what if doing it on your own lead to your wife becoming lost in subterranean tunnels for days. What then? Would that still be relatable? AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!
5. Seven Veils
This is an incredibly fraught movie that tangles itself up, interweaving strands of abuse, trauma, plagiarism, and authenticity, into one narrative. Amanda Seyfried plays a woman directing a controversial re-staging of her mentor’s 20 year old production of the Opera Salome after his death. She is diving back into a world she’s left behind for a long time, and as she does we are gradually brought into full awareness of the complexity and horror of this staging. Veil after veil falls away as we learn the depths of Seyfried’s character’s trauma, her relationship with her mentor, and the way intimate details of her life and suffering are encoded directly into the production which she’s now responsible for. It’s a descent into Avernus, and Seyfried makes us feel her being driven to madness along the way. Egoyan is back! Says this guy, who’s only ever watched The Sweet Hereafter, and now this.
4. Deathstalker
A total delight. Fantasy horror schlock fun that never stoops to being a parody of itself. I literally wrote a review of this on this very website! So I won’t belabor the point here. This is a special movie, the kind of movie that one wishes the (fairly crappy) old Deathstalker movies actually were. And now, in a way, they are. He’s got a big sword that’s four swords attached to one giant handle!
3. The Phoenician Scheme
I am officially a Wes Anderson guy. I never really thought of myself as one before Asteroid City, my #2 movie of 2023. The annoyance and scorn heaped by imbeciles on that beautiful and soulful piece of art made me realize I had to take a stand. I am not neutral on the works of Wes Anderson – I am an ardent supporter, a passionate repeat viewer, though never, NEVER, a “fan”. The new Wes Anderson film, The Phoenician Scheme, does not reach the heights of Asteroid City, though it does follow in its footsteps by working in a secondary narrative that complicates the “reality” of the primary narrative (though not to the same degree or level of complexity).
A rich and immensely powerful father engages in a complicated and exciting financial espionage thriller scheme while trying to connect to his daughter and having dreams of living in the days of the old testament, culminating in a meeting with God (played by Bill Murray). The unreasonable demands of the modern patriarch (both of his family and society at large) are contrasted against the ‘original’ unreasonable and demanding patriarch. Because this is Wes Anderson, this narrative of patriarchal confusion is filtered through whiz-bang plot shenanigans and a series of elaborate sets and miniatures that the camera passes through and by and around at just the right moment at just the right speed. He’s right in the pocket, not working for the transcendental highs of Asteroid City, but using all his technical ability and stylistic know-how to create a fun and memorable film that I’ll be watching with delight in 20 years just as I do today (if I, and electricity, and all the other bits and bobs necessary to watch movies, are still around).
2. One Battle After Another
I have so much trouble talking about this movie, like most of the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. His films are just such compelling objects, they fascinate and are so complete but layered and complex – talking about any one aspect just feels incomplete. What’s clear and admirable about this film is it’s PTA trying to speak directly to this moment. As a director he’s LIVED in period pieces for nearly his entire career, so to use his clout to get an enormous budget from Warner Brothers to make an action heavy weird epic about a washed up revolutionary forced to confront white supremacist assassination squads in the national security state – it’s something!
Ultimately out of everything you could say about this movie, I keep coming back to how much I love DiCaprio’s dipshit former revolutionary Bob. He’s a useless washed up fuck-up, but he’s doing everything he can for his daughter. It’s a movie about fatherhood, about the things that convey fatherhood, both literally and metaphorically, and it comes down heavily on the side of this beat up middle-aged guy who’s checked out but still cares when it matters.
Also shout out to Benicio del Toro who as far as I’m concerned is co-author of this movie. The whole sequence where he takes Bob through his underground railroad operation was entirely his idea? And they paused filming for months to switch to doing that instead of whatever they were going to do instead? It is very literally the best part of the movie. And then Bob falls off the roof! Now that’s comedy. Somebody’s been watching his Buster Keaton.
1. No Other Choice
After all these years, I have returned to Park Chan-wook. In some ways I was born a cinephile in the churning fires of online “best films of the 00’s” lists that at some point would grant the title of MOST EXTREMELY FUCKED UP MOVIE EVER to Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy. I watched it on an illegal streaming site of some description (putlocker anybody?) or possibly in 10 parts on youtube in 480p. The movie remains shocking, visceral, and yes, extreme. It was a movie you didn’t like or dislike – you Experienced it. It was a rite of passage, or at least, that’s how it felt when I was 16. It was a movie for people that watched enough movies to make lists of them, and if you can’t tell from the fact that you are reading my year end list of movies right now, that’s something I wanted to be, very badly. I still do!
So post-Old Boy I did not become a park chan-wook devotee. Most of his films lingered on my “to-watch” lists for a decade plus, I only watched Thirst and I’m a Cyborg But That’s OK, and JSA in the last couple years. You know what movie I did love though? Stoker. I loved Stoker. Maybe I still love Stoker? I haven’t watched it since I was 21 – I wrote an undergraduate essay about it and Oldboy I think. Auteur theory. Very funny! I’m literally making a point about how I’m not a Park Chan-wook guy and I forgot I wrote an essay on him as an auteur in undergrad. But I digress.
I watched the Handmaiden a few years ago and loved it, in case you were wondering, great film. It was watching Decision to Leave last year that made me realize how Important Park Chan-wook is as a modern director, and No Other Choice followed up that experience like a blow to the head.
No Other Choice is phenomenal. It’s a synthesis of everything Chan-wook has always been good at, the dark humor, surreal tone, the sudden violence, the absurdity of society satirized through hyper violence and death. The film is truly bleak, but it’s so funny. There are so many shots that are truly Stimulating in the sense that they present a tableau with stuff happening on both sides and your eye and brain get a workout processing the whole thing at once. I love that, I love when there’s lots of stuff to look at in the frame.
Something that stands out to me is how the movie is as much about marriage as it is about work under capitalism. The way that the various male characters center their selves around their jobs or lack there-of, and then justify it because of an expectation that they need to support their spouses or suffer the consequences, regardless of what the spouses say or feel about the situation, lays bare this raw weakness in their conception of themselves and their relationships. And then later, when the protagonist’s wife makes the ultimate commitment to their marriage in extreme circumstances, we’re left to sit with it, just as we’re left to sit with the protagonist getting his final reward, and the hollowness of it all.
The hollowness of it all! Happy 2026!
Link and Recommendations:
I've been slacking on my RSS reading but very busy with my regular reading so I will be linking to a youtube video and then recommending a book today. Also! Here is your reminder to check out my zine, Hinterlands #1 on itch here if you haven't already.
Masked Manta's Favorite Reads of 2025: I've been getting into booktube a bit lately and I like Masked Manta's videos - definitely wrote the names from this video I haven't read yet into my recommendation spreadsheet, a thing a normal person has. I'm working on a video like this too, but it likely won't come out for at least another week - topical!
