In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2025, Justin Chang, Alison Willmore, and Bilge Ebiri—about the year in cinema.
Hello friends,
Thrilled to be back to Movie Club for another year with you all, even if this year has been one in which everything from the film industry to the media world to our democracy has felt terrifyingly brittle and on the verge of breaking. As I’m writing this, the century-plus-old Warner Bros., one of the remaining major studios, is being tussled over by tech giant Netflix, who made a deal to acquire the company for $83 billion, and the newly formed Paramount Skydance, who are attempting a hostile takeover to the tune of $108.4 billion. It’s hard to take this as anything other than a whoever-wins-we-lose scenario with all sorts of implications for the accelerated death of theatergoing on one side and even more consolidation of power behind the Trump-aligned David Ellison on the other.
What especially stings about all of this is that Warner Bros. happens to have had an incredible year at the movies. Besides being behind both of the movies you picked as best representing 2025, Dana, it also backed that bold Bong Joon Ho swing Mickey 17, and put out A Minecraft Movie, a huge hit that I should probably see eventually for the sake of cross-generational communication. It released the terrific Zach Cregger horror movie Weapons, which just missed my Top 10, the aforementioned James Gunn Superman (which I liked a lot), and a very fun new installment of the Final Destination franchise. If you ever needed a case for how much vitality and interest remains in big old commercial cinema, this slate made it, and the reward for that achievement? Welp.
But Dana, you asked for some reflections on the smaller works on my Top 10, and I’m more than happy to oblige. I caught up with Sex/Love/Dreams, a trilogy of features from Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud, late in the year, and found all three tender and gentle to the point of making me teary, even though that’s not their goal. Love, centering on two commitment-averse co-workers who find themselves commuting by ferry from a nearby island all summer, is my favorite, and Dreams, which begins with a teenager documenting an account of her furious crush on her teacher, goes in surprising directions. But the trilogy is probably best explained by way of Sex, which is about a pair of married, middle-aged male friends who experience different awakenings—one by agreeing to a spontaneous encounter with another man for the first time in his life, and the other by having dreams in which a David Bowie-esque deity sees him as a woman.
These reveals, which eventually are shared with their respective spouses, aren’t without comedy. But the film never treats its characters as jokes—nor does it simplify their revelations into storylines that are only about repressing or denying something that was there all along. Instead, it allows the people it puts on screen to grapple with what they’re feeling, talking things out with their loved ones and figuring out what they want in what feels like real time. It’s a remarkably delicate, mature portrayal of our continued potential to change and grow, even when we think we’re settled in who we are.
Sound of Falling and April do feel linked to me, though the first, from director Mascha Schilinski, is about four generations of families in Germany, and the second, from Dea Kulumbegashvili, is about an OB-GYN doing stalwart, lonely work in a rural part of the country of Georgia. I’ve seen both written off as miserabilist, because they feature some stark depictions of the realities of servant-class women at the dawn of the century being sterilized, as well as a nonverbal teenager getting a kitchen-table abortion to end the latest pregnancy, which no one in the room is willing to acknowledge is the result of her getting sexually abused by her sister’s husband. But that dismissal is both unfair and inaccurate. What astounded me about both films is the way they show what it’s like to learn about the patriarchal restrictions you’re expected to live within, and the offenses you’re expected to tolerate because you’ve been told they’re how the world works. Both are strange, evocative, mesmerizing depictions of the secret histories of women.
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I’m already in danger of running long here, but I did want to take a second for Kelly Reichardt’s wry, wonderful anti-heist picture The Mastermind, which, as you pointed out, Dana, is kind of counterprogramming to all these movies about different types of ragged revolutionary spirit. J.B. Mooney, the hangdog protagonist played so perfectly by Josh O’Connor, isn’t quite the right age to be a hippie, and definitely isn’t the right temperament, and yet he opts for his own personal rebellion amid 1970’s political turmoil by blowing up his own comfortable middle-class life. I love the way that Reichardt puts the robbery he plans toward the start of the film, and dedicates the rest of it to the increasingly unfortunate aftermath of the crime, and I love the way that O’Connor plays J.B. as someone who doesn’t realize how much he’s been coasting on charm until that charm runs out. Most of all, though, I love the ending, which affirms that you don’t have to consider yourself part of a scene for that scene to catch up with you.
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The Underrated 2025 Movie That’s Going to Make People Lose Their Minds When It Hits Netflix
Justin, I see you also linked Sound of Falling and April in your year-end list, and included Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl in those connections as well. I’d love to hear from you on that film, and on Sorry, Baby (a movie I didn’t click with the same way others did), and on Who By Fire, a title that passed me by entirely. But I really want to hear from you on this year’s Steven Soderbergh double feature, especially Black Bag, which strikes me as the most underrated release of the year, and one of those movies that people are going to lose their minds about when it hits Netflix someday.
—Alison
My Top 10
10. Sex/Love/Dreams
9. Marty Supreme
8. Sound of Falling
7. The Naked Gun
6. My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow
5. April
4. The Secret Agent
3. Black Bag
2. The Mastermind
1. One Battle After Another
And 10 runners-up, in alphabetical order:
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
Blue Moon
Grand Theft Hamlet
Invention
Lurker
Peter Hujar’s Day
Preparation for the Next Life
Souleymane’s Story
Splitsville
Weapons
Read all of the entries in Slate’s 2025 Movie Club.
