Given the weight of the filmmakers at work in 2025, the year underwhelmed. Still, there was a lot worth celebrating.
Before we get to the list, here are five runners-up (in alphabetical order): Hamnet, It Was Just an Accident, The Mastermind, Materialists, Train Dreams.
10. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Tom Cruise’s “final” Mission: Impossible goes to silly lengths to connect the franchise’s disparate lore, but at the end of the day, we’re all here to see Cruise leap out of planes, climb towers, and hold his breath for six minutes. The Final Reckoning delivers Buster Keaton-esque stunts and big-screen spectacle.
9. Bugonia: Yorgos Lanthimos’ remake of Save the Green Planet! is as bugfuck as you’d expect from a director whose most conventional movie is The Favourite. Come for Emma Stone’s haunting corporate speak, stay for Jesse Plemons’ chemically castrated conspiracy theorist. Lanthimos has a knack for making light of societal ills in absurdist, black comedy, or sci-fi wrapping.
8. Sentimental Value: Scorsese-De Niro. Kurosawa-Mifune. Trier-Reinsve. The director-actor duo carved out a niche in the troubled-and-emotionally-stunted-women subgenre. Sentimental Value, the latest from the pair, plumbs emotional depths without resorting to bombast or catharsis. Through stellar acting from Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt effectively communicate emotion without saying anything at all.
7. Superman: After James Gunn found genuine pathos in relatively anonymous characters like Star-Lord, Rocket Raccoon, and Peacemaker, he finally got a chance to play with the expensive toys. True to the character, Gunn’s Superman is altruistic, idealistic, and optimistic. In 2025, Superman was precisely what I needed.
6. Marty Supreme: Marty Mauser is the model character for this moment in American history. Marty substitutes success for bravado, aboveboard work for scams, and lasting relationships for opportunity. He’s a con artist masquerading as a champion. Marty Supreme pays this off with laughs and co-writer/director Josh Safdie’s trademark tension.
5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Best described as Kafkaesque motherhood horror, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is as squirm-inducing as it is delightful. “How can things get worse?” Just wait. Bronstein’s husband Ronald co-wrote Good Time, Uncut Gems, and Marty Supreme. The proclivity to torture protagonist and audience alike must run in the household.
4. Weapons: Zach Cregger’s maximalist missing children flick is the most fun I had at the movies in 2025. Weapons borrows from the Sam Raimi school of comedy horror with as many laughs as scares. Like last year’s Nosferatu, peel back the layers and you find that Weapons had more to say than your traditional horror movie.
3. Sinners: Ryan Coogler’s vampire film is the metaphor that keeps giving. Is it about white artists leaching off of Black innovators, freedom through artistic expression, or vampirism as a stand-in for assimilation? Yes, and much more. If you want it to be, Sinners is a rich text that rewards repeat viewings. If you don’t, it’s a stylish, sexy vampire flick. Everyone wins.
2. No Other Choice: If Park Chan-wook isn’t our best working director, he’s on the shortlist. The latest from the South Korean master, an entertaining-but-scathing rebuke of capitalism, is the year’s most underappreciated film. No Other Choice explores the degrees to which a person will debase themselves and their fellow worker to maintain their social standing, and the system that forces that predicament.
1. One Battle After Another: After more than 20 years of development, Paul Thomas Anderson finally brought his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland to the silver screen. The result is a movie so prescient that it may have been written yesterday. Its portrait of competing revolutionary visions, one of resistance through violence and another through community-building and emancipation, is as clear-eyed as anything we’ve seen at the movies.
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