Best Films of 2025
Best Films of 2025 1. Hamnet , directed by Chloe Zhao. I had read Maggie O’Farrell’s tearjerker novel on a plane back from Chicago, so I knew what I was walking into when I saw this film. The book had choked me up, and I was certain that a cinematic version of the closing sequence would devastate me. I was correct but did not know to the extent that I would find myself sobbing at the end of this imagined telling of Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway. The central performance of Jessie Buckley is a masterclass of control. This witchy woman who occupies the margins of early modern Avon must constrain herself and rely on only herself. She is then broken apart by the deepest grief a woman can experience, and it is only in the final sequence that we watch her healed by the power of her husband’s words in Hamlet. A staggering achievement that Buckley has achieved here. We can quibble with that coda—no, the “to be or not to be?...
