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? Soliloquy was not delivered in those first performances by Hamlet sitting at the edge of the stage (what gen z bs is this, I thought), since those seated up top in the gods would not hear what was being said. So much of the performance would have been declamatory and gestural, but we can lose that for the emotional immediacy and the affirmation that the plays of Shakespeare even four hundred years later are still transformative. 

2.        One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. This film is just a series of inexplicable dopamine hits sent directly to your brain. Leo being funny and unable to come up with his password; Benicio del Toro’s “few small beers”; Teyana Taylor telling a crusty Sean Penn that her “pussy don’t pop for you”; that car chase scene on the hilly terrain. Has everyone certifiably lost their mind in the film? Of course. Did it also feel subversive that we had a movie about revolutionary leftist guerrillas in the year of our lord 2025? Oh, it did; I am convinced that my name now exists on a list of people who saw this opening weekend in blue cities. Anderson will finally win his Oscar—belatedly—but I approve of him winning for this ode to the California ethos as seen through a rather bonkers adaptation of Thomas Pynchon. 

3.        Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie. The Brothers Safdie have constructed a trilogy of stressful little indie gems: Good Time, Uncut Gems, and now Marty have given us a set of stellar performances from Pattinson, Sandler and Timmy. This film is such a clear elevation of Safdie’s work. The 1980s aesthetic is so strong with this, and not simply because of the synth-heavy score. References abound to Spielberg, Boorman, Scorsese, de Palma, etc. This is such a rich tapestry in the effort to construct a narrative about an almost entirely unsympathetic competitive ping pong player. Timmy walks the line of being compelling and deeply unlikable. Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin O’Leary occupy the screen in perhaps the most bizarre movie marriage of the year, if not the decade. I would have appreciated a couple more scenes for Fran Drescher and Sandra Bernhard, but I will wait for the Criterion director’s cut. 

4.        Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier. Oh, how I love a moody Scandinavian drama. The unspoken trauma, the rifts between decades-long married partners, the muddled expectations of parents on their children, the barely contained rage are all hallmarks of the works of Bergman, von Trier, Dreyer, and Kaurismäki. Joachim Trier who directed a great “woman on the edge” film with Renate Reinsve in 2020, “The Worst Person in the World,” has delved deeply into Bergman territory here, where a patriarchal director (very Bergmanesque), played by the great Stellan Skarsgård, must convince his daughter to play the lead in his upcoming film. She refuses, so Elle Fanning is cast, much to everyone’s chagrin. The family dynamics are complicated yet laid out in such a clear delineation. There is no room to be confused here. Once again, a satisfying ending brings together several storylines that seemed unrelated at first demonstrate the complicated webs we weave with our families. 

5.        Heated Rivalry, created by Jacob Tierney. Yes, gay hockey smut can be cinema. Are you a Shane thirsting after a Kip? Are you a Scott who feels trapped in a closet of your making? Or are you an Ilya who just cannot bring your walls down? These are the questions we have all been posing to one another since the beginning of December. We all cried at the end of episode 5, and then we all went to the cottage. It is indicative of how limited the representation is for queer characters that this has caught on so strongly, but the love that straight women have for this demonstrates the need for a myriad of new ways to discuss sexuality across the spectrum, even for those who may not be actively participating in the acts themselves. 

6.        K-Pop Demon Hunters, directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Applehans. For no truly discernible reason, I put off watching this for months. Even after the song Golden had taken over the Billboard pop charts, and after every one of the children in my life had sadly shaken their heads at me when I informed them that I had sadly not yet watched this, I finally put this on the Netflix a few weeks ago. You know what? I had a great time. A BTS concert tribute movie meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why, yes, I am into this. The music is some of the best pop music of the year, and the dueling girl group vs the evil demon boy band is an entertaining conceit. Maybe, like all those kids I know, I, too, will watch this a couple dozen times as well. 

7.        Train Dreams, directed by Clint Bentley. Denis Johnson’s cerebral novella did not strike me as terribly cinematic, but this adaptation has done a phenomenal job of breaking this story out of the main character’s head. This bleak, desolate story of a lonely man living on the outskirts of civilization is somehow life-affirming, even with one of the darkest final shots in a film in the last decade. Joel Edgerton has been given the chance to portray a multifaceted character that he has rarely been given the chance to construct. This film has probably the finest cinematography of the year, and with its 4:3 aspect ratio, it feels simultaneously claustrophobic, old fashioned, and expansive. It is a real tightrope of a performance by those cameras. 

8.        No Other Choice, directed by Park Chan-wook. This may not be a masterpiece on the level of Park’s The Handmaiden or Oldboy, but it is one of the finest exegeses of late-stage capitalism we have. Fascinating to call a movie about the failures of capitalism, constantly predicated on the freedom of choice, we are told, ‘no other choice” because, in fact, capitalism denies us choice. Here in this twisty tale of a man who will do absolutely anything to get a job and save face in front of his family. We find a society crumbling under the pressure of keeping up appearances through consumption and the disappearance of labor to robots (sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?). The film asks a pleading and sorrowful question: how can we even maintain relations with other humans in this environment? The answer, even after an ending that provides a false sense of happiness and hope, seems to be rather negative. 

9.        Song Sung Blue, directed by Craig Brewer. A movie about a Neil Diamond impersonator sounded patently ridiculous to me. I may be a fan of “Solitary Man” and ‘Forever in Blue Jeans,” but I thought I would have a hard limit on how much of Hugh Jackman with feather bangs I could take. Turns out, I possess no such limit. I cried through the last section of this movie as if I had wandered into another showing of Hamnet. I had never seen the doc upon which this was based, so I had no idea what I was walking into. For some reason, I was deeply touched by this pair of misfits (and a touching performance by Kate Hudson, rightfully nominated for Best Actress), who attempt through strife, trials and obligations to live a life of the arts. As long as they have each other and their music, they will be able to survive. Touching and poignant, even for someone like me with a cold, dead heart. 

10.  It Was Just an Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times referred to this as a dark comedy that becomes absurdly funny. I did not find this film about Iranians discovering their past prison torturer by mere happenstance to be in any true way funny, but this may be indicative of our current global political moment. Look at what was nominated for best comedy at the Golden Globes: OBAA, Marty, No Other Choice, Bugonia. What happened to those funny films of my youth. The Bridesmaids, the Stepbrothers, the Knocked Ups. Can we have at least one or two of those again. I am sick of calling a dark movie about torture a comedy because I chuckled when the torturer being flung into a bridal trousseau, or a woman hitting an annoying guy over the head with a backpack. 

11.  Nouvelle Vague, directed by Richard Linklater. Linklater received much more acclaim and attention for his biopic of Richard Rodgers collaborator Lorenz Hart, “Blue Moon,” this year, but Nouvelle Vague is a much finer piece of filmmaking from our most lowkey American auteur. This loving ode to the making of Godard’s “Breathless” does an admirable job of capturing the French zeitgeist as film broke wide open with the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, i.e. Varda, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer. Aubry Dullin, cast as the great French heartthrob Jean-Paul Belmondo, looks so eerily like the classic star that I was convinced at some point that generative AI was behind it. A delightful romp about the behind the scenes of one of the greatest films made in the 20^th century. Unlike the stagey and staid Blue Moon, this movie beats with life. 

12.  Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler. Michael B. Jordan is great in a double part, some of the music is a lot of fun, and the cinematography is beautiful, but I had some real problems with this movie. It feels like two movies smashed together: it starts off with a tale about twin brothers fleeing the Chicago mob and coming back home to the Mississippi Delta, and then vampires show up. Ok. I was also troubled by the racial politics of this. Is this film arguing that any real cross-racial coalition is impossible? I don’t want this to be something argued during Trump 2.0, thank you very much. Also, Hailee Steinfeld as the primary sacrificial victim plays into a set of Jim Crow-era tropes about mulatto women that were not sufficiently subverted or analyzed here not to feel like a simple retread. But, hey, it got me thinking, so that’s something.

13.  Warfare, directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza/Friendship, directed by Andrew DeYoung. We have been told for the last year and a half that masculinity is in crisis, as a shocking amount of young men have drifted to the right politically. However, masculinity is always in crisis. It was in the 18^th century, in the 19^th century, after WWII, after 9/11. There is nothing new under the sun. These two films take very different tacks to understanding what it means to be a man. We have a harrowing tale of warfare in Iraq as a battalion is caught in a barrage of violence and they must escape with their wounded brethren. Then we have Tim Robinson striving diligently to be friends with Paul Rudd. These two approaches show not only the variety of masculine performativity, but also the pitfalls of any type of maleness that can lead to abject loneliness or disconnection. These films may seem unlinked but both are asking similar questions of how to define a man today. 

14.  History of Sound, directed by Oliver Hermanus. This is a combination of Brokeback Mountain and Songcatcher. Two homosexual ethnomusicologists are sent off into New England woods to discover long forgotten Scotch-Irish folk songs. While on the way, they fall in love. Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor yearn over the course of years. Mescal, who has become the great portrayer of longing, shines here as the man carrying a torch for a rather toxic man he fell in love with when he was 22. Many of us can relate. 

15. Sorry, Baby, directed by Eva Victor. A delightful film about academia (especially in contradistinction to Luca Guadagnino's bizarre ode to sexual harassment at Yale, "After the Hunt"). It may make some mistakes about the ivory tower and the precarity of adjunct faculty, but the film's central story of a woman seeking to recover from a traumatic encounter and her relations with her friends and her cat is endearing. 

16. Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. I hated the ending of this movie, but I loved the send-up of Emma Stone as a very Elizabeth Holmes-like healthcare startup CEO. Her meandering speech about how the firm is now 9-5, to encourage her employees' work' life balance, except for those working under deadline, or those who just love their jobs so much, is pure satirical brilliance. I wish I had turned it off before the last fifteen minutes, because I would have finder feelings for the film as a whole.