I’m not going to lie: 2025 was not a year that’s easy to put a rosy spin on, even in the introductory blurb to a list of the year’s best movies. This has been a 12-month period of daily pummeling by the forces of history and fate, of waking up to an infinite scroll of dumbfoundingly terrible news chased by an overpriced cup of Trump-tariff coffee. During that stretch early in the year when movie pickings always tend to be slim, I clung to older films I already knew I loved as if they were flotsam from a sinking ship. But as winter made way for spring, unusual and beautiful new releases began to poke their heads up like crocuses through frozen ground. By fall, there was a virtual harvest table of substantial, satisfying, sometimes sublime new films to choose from—such a bounty of them that I’ve appended a list of 10 runners-up rather than my usual five. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 2025 movies that helped me keep on keeping on.
April
Pyramide Distribution
The Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s second feature film is utterly sui generis: an unsettling work of psychological horror that doubles as a slice-of-life study of systemic misogyny and rape culture. The film was shot largely in secret because of Georgia’s strict anti-abortion laws; it follows the lonely daily existence of Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), a committed OB-GYN who drives to remote villages in her off hours to deliver abortion care to young women who are too poor, and sometimes too mentally or physically disabled, to escape from the men who are sexually abusing them in their own communities and homes. The subject matter is bleak, yes, but Kulumbegashvili’s patiently observant camera takes in more than just the landscape of human suffering. There’s one extraordinary crane shot in which the camera rises up to sail high above a field of wildflowers about to be battered by a gathering thunderstorm, an image of fragility and danger that’s stayed with me ever since, well, April. Coming soon to streaming.
Blue Moon
Sony Pictures Classics
Richard Linklater’s autumnal portrait of the great 20th-century songwriter Lorenz Hart took two viewings to open up into one of my favorite movies of the year. While I enjoyed the film thoroughly the first time around, I came out thinking of it as a lovely but minor entry in the director’s canon, on my mental shelf next to Hit Man or Bernie or Everybody Wants Some!!, rather than crammed in with Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy and School of Rock and Boyhood and … the shelf of great Linklater movies is pretty full, but as of my second viewing, I’m making space on it for Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke’s body-and-soul transformation into the witty, painfully insecure, self-evidently doomed Hart is a step into new territory for him as an actor. Working within parameters that could have made the movie feel stodgily theatrical (a single location, a three-act structure), he and Linklater quietly reinvent the artist biopic, custom-tailoring it to fit this one very specific and instantly unforgettable character. Read the review. Read what’s fact and what’s fiction in the film. Rent it for $19.99.
Familiar Touch
Music Box Films
The best directorial debuts of any year are worth paying attention to. Where will our next crop of great filmmakers come from? In the case of writer-director Sarah Friedland, the question has a multipart answer: with a background as an eldercare worker, a choreographer, and a creator of documentaries about the dance world, Friedland brings a bracingly novel perspective to her unassuming but self-assured first narrative feature. The legendary stage actress Kathleen Chalfant plays Ruth Goldman, an octogenarian former chef with dementia whose conflicted son moves her into an assisted-living home. There have been some excellent movies about Alzheimer’s and late-life care in recent years, but none have had the keen eye and light, at times even humorous touch of this compassionate character study. Friedland never frames Ruth’s gradual loss of faculties as pitiable or tragic; rather, guided by her lead actress’s profoundly intuitive and often wordless performance, she lets us see how letting go of the version of ourselves we once held on clung to can be accompanied by a deepening of spiritual and bodily self-knowledge. Stream it from Mubi or rent it for $5.99.
It Was Just an Accident
Memento Distribution
Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or–winning drama about a group of former Iranian political prisoners who capture a man they believe was once their torturer is not at all the dour, punishing experience that one might assume from that stark description of its plot. Instead, Panahi, who has himself served time in prison as well as under house arrest for defying Iranian censorship laws, delivers a taut, suspenseful, and at times unexpectedly funny revenge thriller. By the time this 104-minute masterwork arrives at its perfect final shot, both the characters and the audience have been made to confront difficult and ultimately unanswerable questions about the purpose, and the corrosive moral effects, of seeking an eye for an eye. Read the review. See it in theaters.
Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching
Owen Reister/YouTube
Every Top 10 list should have calls for at least one cheeky choice, an out-of-left-field artifact that calls into question some aspect of what it meant that year to “go to the movies.” This documentary about two novice birders living out of their minivan on a quixotic year-long road trip hails from an even less expected place than left field: After being made on a shoestring by Owen and Quentin Reiser, the St. Louis–born brothers who are also its main characters, it was released for free on YouTube, where it quickly gathered a word-of-mouth cult audience. “I’d run through a brick wall for that bird,” murmurs the awed Quentin when they finally encounter a specimen of the intricately patterned, comically plumed Montezuma quail. Spend two hours with the Reiser brothers as they toke up and philosophize in their busted Kia, and you may end up feeling the same fierce loyalty toward Listers. Read the review. Watch it … right here, on this page, via the YouTube video embedded below.
My Undesirable Friends: Part 1—Last Air in Moscow
Marminchilla
Nothing presents a greater challenge or a greater opportunity to a documentarian than when the film they thought they were making is transformed into an entirely different project by the intervention of an unforeseeable event. When the Russian-born American director Julia Loktev went to Moscow in late 2021 to make a movie about the precarious lives of independent journalists under Vladimir Putin, she had no idea just how precarious the situation was about to get. Early in 2022, news broke of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This not only made the story of Putin’s crackdown on investigative reporting much more urgent; it also placed the reporters whose lives Loktev had been following in grave danger of arrest, detainment, or worse. As we watch Loktev’s subjects scramble to decide whether to flee the country—itself a prospect fraught with peril—or to stay and struggle against a regime whose overwhelming propaganda machine makes their truthful reporting all but impossible to get out to the public, there’s a sense of history unfolding live before our eyes. The second part of this already-five-hour documentary, entitled Exile, is now in postproduction and is set to be released next year. Before it comes out, make the commitment to spend a couple of consecutive nights in the company of Anna, Olga, Irina, Ksenia, and the other brave, committed, righteously angry, and understandably terrified reporters and broadcasters whose homes and workplaces Loktev shows us in such affectionate day-to-day detail. By the time you reach the end of Part 1, you will care about all of them deeply enough to be anxious for an update on their well-being in the next chapter. Read our interview with the director. See it in theaters.
One Battle After Another
Warner Bros. Pictures
I can’t be the only one out there who needed an ever-refreshing fount of inspirational mantras to get through this cosmically shitty year. The arrival of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another in September provided me not only with perhaps the most cinematically thrilling experience I had in a theater in 2025, but with a stockpile of handy new phrases. Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos urging Leonardo DiCaprio’s flailing stoner Bob to breathe through his panic with the words ocean waves. Teyana Taylor, as the fugitive revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills, heard in voice-over as the daughter who never knew her (the marvelous newcomer Chase Infiniti) reads her tender, regretful letter in the film’s last scene: “We failed. Maybe you will not. Maybe you will be the one who puts the world right.” Bob waxing philosophical with the infuriating underground-resistance hotline operator who’s a stickler for secret catchphrases: “Life, man. LIFE!” Then there are those days when—after an especially brutal onslaught of fresh headlines about the forces of cruelty, stupidity, and racism once more winning out over all that is beautiful, just, and human—the only advice that makes sense is Sensei’s much-memed line about having “a few small beers.” After three viewings, what sticks with me most about Anderson’s shaggy sprawling seriocomic epic, and what gives me hope not just for the future of movies but for the future in general, is One Battle’s relentless kinetic energy. This is a movie that, like the hapless but indomitable Bob, keeps moving forward no matter what. Read the review. Read our comparison with Thomas Pynchon’s novel. Rent it for $19.99.
The Secret Agent
Vitrine Filmes/Neon
In 2023, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, best known to American audiences for his 2019 “weird Western” Bacurau, made an autobiographical documentary called Pictures of Ghosts about his memories of growing up in the northeastern port city of Recife. That film, stitched together from the director’s extensive home movies and scenes from his own feature films set in his hometown, might be thought of as a kind of sketchbook for The Secret Agent, a capacious political thriller set mainly in Recife during the oppressive military dictatorship of the 1970s. In a mesmerizing movie-star turn, Wagner Moura plays Marcelo (or is his name Armando?), a research scientist who is forced to go into hiding for reasons the film lets unfold in their own time. On top of being a clear-eyed examination of the way corrupt local governments and criminal gangs colluded with a murderous regime, The Secret Agent is both a heartfelt tender drama about a family separated by the threat of state violence and a deftly drawn sketched group portrait of an underground resistance network finding ways to congregate and celebrate even in the worst of times. See it in theaters.
Sentimental Value
Nordisk Film/Mubi
Joachim Trier’s study of a troubled Oslo family across multiple generations is an expansion on, and deepening of, his exploration of one young woman’s search for her professional and romantic identity in his 2021 surprise hit The Worst Person in the World. That movie’s breakout star, the transfixing Renate Reinsve, returns as a successful but depressive stage actress who, along with her more stable younger sister (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), has grown up semi-estranged from their father (Stellan Skarsgård), an acclaimed filmmaker experiencing a creative slump. When this narcissistic patriarch sweeps back into his daughters’ lives with a plan to shoot an autobiographical movie in their longtime family home, what could have been a pat dysfunctional-family drama blossoms into a lyrical meditation on history, generational trauma, mental illness, and the potential healing power of art. Read our review. See it in theaters.
Sinners
Warner Bros. Pictures
There was no greater explosion of joy on a movie screen this year than the dance-floor scene—you know the one—in Ryan Coogler’s sprawling Southern Gothic action thriller. Or is Sinners more of a vampire movie, or a historical drama about life in a majority-Black community under Jim Crow, or a booty-shaking primer on the history of American roots music? Coogler’s opus moves as freely among these genres as the dancers at the juke joint operated by enterprising twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan in a bravura double performance). The magic trick Coogler pulls off in Sinners, evidenced by but in no way limited to that moment on the dance floor, is to bring a whole town’s worth of characters (even the undead ones!) to vivid life, while also engaging with big ideas about racialized violence, cultural appropriation, and the centrality of pleasure—musical, sexual, culinary, and otherwise—to any struggle worth fighting. Read our review. Read a breakdown of whether it will be too scary for you. Buy it for $4.99, or stream it on HBO Max.
10 Honorable Mentions
28 Years Later
Caught by the Tides
Eephus
The Mastermind
Peter Hujar’s Day
Roofman
Sound of Falling
Superman
The Testament of Ann Lee
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Read more about the best of 2025.
