My 10 Favorite Movies of 2025
10) PREDATOR: BADLANDS
This world is so richly designed and brought to life that I couldn’t help feel like this could have been an awesome story to tell as a video game. I don’t think I’ve ever actually had that thought before, honestly. Each setting was as beautiful and interesting as the last, and the diversity and creativity in wildlife that wanted our protagonist dead was genuinely astounding — and that’s not to mention the Synths sent by Weyland-Yutani. The movie does a really good job making the worldbuilding feel important, wrapping it all up with an impressive bow in the third act. Dan Trachtenberg could have just had us move through the places he built and fight through the obstacles he placed in our way, but no, he made it all an important part of the story, and for that, I tip my cap.
9) SORRY, BABY
I didn’t learn until after the credits rolled that the director of this was also the lead actor and the sole writer — oh, and it’s her feature debut. Everything about this felt so confident. The direction was fluid and alive — there were a couple moments that brought a smile to my face, built entirely by the cinematography and editing. The writing was sharp, fearlessly shifting tones, breaking our heart one moment then making us laugh the next — the result feeling far from jarring, but rather, like real life as experienced by this protagonist vividly sketched and brought to life by Eva Victor.
8) SUPERMAN
When we spent something like ten minutes straight in a small apartment listening to Clark and Lois do nothing but talk in the first act of a blockbuster Superman movie, I knew we were in for something special.
In true James Gunn fashion, I actually cared about the characters — I was hooked by how human they felt. Superman’s heart is in the spotlight, the blood pumping through everything in this film. Lois was a layered character. Lex Luthor was an engaging villain, playfully portrayed by Nicholas Hoult. The side-heroes were not present merely for marketing; they served a purpose for the story, and they each did the best with the screen-time they were given. The animal side-kick wasn’t just cute, he wasn’t just useful, he had a whole ass personality with flaws and unique quirks.
The character work isn’t all that’s to like in this either. The action was consistently fun to watch. The plot moved with good pace, with effective twists and turns. If I could change anything at all, I would tone down Superman’s speech to Lex a couple notches — the audience saw everything he was preaching in the hours that preceded it. Other than that, I’m happy to report that my superhero fatigue isn’t actually permanent — I just need great movies in the genre to come out more often than they do.
7) IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU
In one fell swoop, this film snatched two common cinematic superlatives for itself:
1) Feel Bad Movie of the Year
2) Don’t Have Children Movie of the Year
We are with a sensational Rose Byrne, experiencing a two-hour panic attack we wish would mercifully end but need to know how it resolves. Quite the resolution, I must say; the last couple minutes of this hit me just right — especially that last shot of her daughter, who she’s finally taking a second to see.
6) BLUE MOON
Ethan Hawke is unleashed in this chamber piece that felt to me like Richard Linklater channeling prime Woody Allen.
Seriously, I watched the blue Sony Pictures Classics title screen appear, sitting in a tiny independent cinema, bringing to mind the days of annual Woody releases. Then the movie started, a bar in New York City was the setting, the dialogue was snappy and witty, the protagonist was neurotic and the performance was captivating. This film took me back in time in more ways than one, and I loved every minute of it.
5) WEAPONS
This story is told through the eyes of several beautifully layered characters in a town where seventeen elementary school students inexplicably went missing on the same night. What follows is what I thought was a story about how a community is affected by great tragedy. We see characters fall into the arms of their vices. We see their worst traits bubble to the surface. Fingers get pointed, then lives are ruined — and/or the other way around.
Then, a good ways through the runtime, we’re introduced to the actual antagonist of this film, and my reading of the story shifted. After a while wading in the terrors built by the writer/director, searching for signs through the darkness, I started to see this story as a modern day folk tale about a witch. My reading could very well be way off, but once I started viewing the film with that lens, my wading in the darkness started to become far more focused.
Allegories, metaphors, and all the like aside, I’m so impressed by Zach Cregger’s directorial work here. Even when I wasn’t sure where the film was going or what it was trying to say, I was still feeling everything he wanted me to feel whenever he wanted me to feel it. I was tense when he wanted me to be, jumped when he wanted me to, squirmed and flinched and laughed when he wanted me to. Not unlike his antagonist, he was in full control of my emotions, my attention, and my experience watching this, only his second feature film.
4) ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
A rewatch on IMAX really unlocked this film for me. I went into the first screening with all the expectations and preconceived notions that come with “written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson” for me. Still, I genuinely enjoyed my first viewing. A second viewing threw all of that baggage aside, allowing me to watch this film as it was, instead of how I wanted it to be — how it should have been viewed in the first place.
Just a few notes on a film that’s being discussed ad nauseum in film circles and beyond: Leonardo DiCaprio is a comedic genius; Sean Penn gives one of the best performances by a supporting actor that I’ve ever seen; this is basically an action movie for cinephiles — its pace is marvelously breakneck, and damn near every scene is electric.
3) MARTY SUPREME
I’ve long praised Chalamet for his filmography — the man knows how to choose movies to work on. I have not, however, been as big a fan of his work on those films. He’s one of those actors that, to my eyes, always looks like he’s acting. I struggle to see past his performances to find the characters. This might be the first time I wholeheartedly bought into the character.
There’s so much to love about this movie, so much that has become predictable (in the best ways possible) for the Safdie name: The jittery energy, the artful messiness, the uneasy cinematography, the New York City of it all, but allow me to focus on what I most love to focus on: Character, the aforementioned protagonist of the film: The writing, in the micro (dialogue) and macro (arcs), for Marty was remarkable. This man will say absolutely anything he has to in order to get what he wants, he’ll say what he has to in order to make his point. He’s a slick-talking, hustling young man who is constantly working at the knife’s edge of his capacity to con people or weasel his way out of every situation he finds himself in — if a couple things go wrong or the person across from him shows enough resistance, the cocky, seemingly bulletproof twenty-something starts to flounder spectacularly. The character was vividly drawn, sensationally flawed, tragic in the ways of Shakespeare, and endlessly fun to watch. Needless to say, all of that would either fall apart or never come to fruition with a weaker actor tasked with bringing him to the big screen — this is one of those performances that feel like the actor was born to play the role.
2) SINNERS
This movie is more or less split in half, between the vampire stuff and the pre-vampire stuff. I’m sure there’s a healthy chunk of audiences who wish the vampire stuff was more prevalent in a movie marketing itself as a horror flick. But I’m in the polar opposite camp; I wish I got more of the pre-vampire stuff. I wish I had two more hours of it — shit, I’ll take ten more hours of it.
This story is bursting at the seams with rich histories for the people, places, and things that inhabit it. The first half of the film follows Smoke and Stack as they go from place to place, beautifully shot, portrayed as an organic part of the world our characters move through, places that exist after the camera moves away from them. The twins meet with fascinating people doing interesting things, talking about lives they lived before the movie started, picking up on relationships that go back years, chock-full of experiences we’ll never be privy to. It’s so rare for a movie to present a world that feels like it’s filled with thousands of stories that’ll never be told, hundreds of hours with these characters that will never be mined, so much space in these places that will never be explored.
This feels like a phenomenal adaptation of a 600-page novel. I want to go buy that book so damn bad right now. I’m sick to my stomach that it doesn’t exist.
A second viewing allowed me sink my teeth into the subtext of it all, to pay attention to the metaphors at play, the deeper themes. I love how cool this film is, how rich with story and character it is. I love that it’s not afraid to make the vampires actually vampires. I love that it’s a story very much revolving around Black people set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi that explores themes more complex than “racism is bad.” I knew this was a great film on first viewing. A second viewing showed me it’s even better than that.
1) HAMNET
I genuinely can’t remember the last time I was this moved by a film at the cinema — I cried discussing it on the way home after fighting back tears for the majority of its runtime.
This is a story that when described on a whim would sound either mundane or melodramatic, but when experienced with the guidance of Chloe Zhao’s masterful hand is anything but — the emotions are raw and they’re potent, and they’re earned. This is a story about falling in love, being in love, about building a life for oneself, about raising a family, about suffering loss, about grieving alone, about connecting to loved ones and strangers alike through universal experiences and empathy.
The first three-fourths of this movie explore life at its best and at its worst. Then, in the final quarter, the film pivots into a story about the reasons human beings have told stories and made art for as long as we’ve existed. As the credits rolled, I was stunned in my seat, utterly awestruck by how everything I’ve just talked about came together so perfectly — a shining example of a whole that is somehow greater than the sum of its remarkable parts.
I can go on and on about this for hours, analyzing every character, every scene, every sequence, every chapter, every act, because it was all so purposeful, so deftly executed and strung together; but I’ll leave it here for now.
I fully acknowledge that recency bias might be at play here, so ask me about this again in a year or two, but as of the end of 2025, I’m willing to say that this is my favorite film released in theaters since 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Only time will tell if that stays true.
One final thing I’ll mention is that if Jessie Buckley doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role I never want to hear somebody bring up that contemptible award show around me ever again — the performance she gives in this is one of the best I’ve ever seen, let alone the best I’ve seen this year.