Various lists, thoughts, and reflections on 2025 and the movies from our editors & contributors…
Elizabeth Cantwell
Senior Editor
Top 10 Rewatches of 2025
It was a year, for me, of heavier-than-usual rewatching, which speaks to the extreme difficulty of staying present in our contemporary world and feeling good about what’s around us. If I’m going to spend all day in 2025, could I please have two hours at the end of the night where I can be somewhere else, sometime else? I’m not usually one for nostalgia, and in the past have even argued with my spouse when he wants to rewatch something and I would rather see something new, but this year I leaned in to revisiting my favorite cinematic worlds. (Also, movies just … used to look and be better?)
There were, of course, times when movies I was rewatching hit me in a different place than I was expecting, or resonated with my own emotions and experiences in new and surprising and upsetting and beautiful ways. Here are the ten films that, upon rewatching, felt most important and relevant to right now.
10. The Terminator (1984)
I mean, yes: this is what 2025 feels like—running from an unstoppable killing machine/unwanted advances in technology that are trying to destroy everything that makes us human while also attempting to ensure that your children somehow have a future. But, you know, make it sexy. I love this movie for its insistence on human resilience, back-against-the-wall creativity in the face of indestructible odds, and <Huey Lewis voice> the power of love.
9. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
I got to see this on the big screen this year, and unsurprisingly it remains accurately cynical. The thing that really shocked me was how well Ripper’s anti-fluoride conspiracy theory mindset presciently mirrored our current Secretary of Health and Human Services’ beliefs. Close your eyes and you can imagine, without too much of a stretch, the lines about the “conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids” being spoken at any 2025 HHS press conference. Down with Tylenol; activate the doomsday device!
8. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Also saw this on the big screen. I love the texture and feeling of this movie. Everyone’s sick; everyone’s ugly; everyone’s pissed off and inconvenienced—that’s New York City in the 1970s. It’s also how I wish more contemporary movies looked and felt, because that’s how we’re all actually doing inside, right? Angry that our daily jobs suck, frustrated at the constant pressure to make others happy, held hostage by a group of irrelevant and greedy men.
7. Mulholland Drive (2001)
I hate that this viewing was spurred by David Lynch’s death—but I suspect he himself would tell me not to hate that, and remind me that the consciousness lives on after death. This movie remains gorgeous, haunting, and inspiring. Just as I now will sometimes find myself saying “weekend projects!” to my kids as we pull out some craft or art supplies on a rainy Saturday, I also find myself trying to remember to live in the present keeping David Lynch’s ways of looking at the world alive.
6. Gattaca (1997)
Sure, it’s telling that a lot of the selections on this list reflect some sort of dystopia. But Gattaca also stuck with me on this rewatch not just because it reminded me that Jude Law is a true gift—or that Ethan Hawke is a true gift—but also because it is such a resonant parable of resistance against that which wants to smooth over the beautiful defects of our flawed, mortal humanity. In 2026, I refuse to let anyone else dictate the circumference of my potential.
5. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5 (2000 – 2001)
I’ve been rewatching Buffy with my 12-year-old, who is very mad at my suggestion that we may need to take a long-ish break before starting Season 6. There is so much about Season 5 that remains galvanizing: the possibility of second acts for a middle-aged person whose first career is over; the importance of found family and community; the need for continued resistance in the face of threats to your existence; the necessity of allowing yourself to feel and live with grief; the vulnerability it takes to admit that you are not everything you thought you were. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it, indeed.
4. Stand By Me (1986)
Another rewatch brought on by the death of a director, this one tragic and traumatic. But what a gift to leave behind pieces of your life and mind in 2-hour chunks! I hadn’t seen Stand By Me since I was much younger, and watching it as a parent really opened the film up for me in new ways. More than ever, we now have to let ourselves—and our children—go on difficult journeys, cross bridges, encounter the darkness, and lean on each other to come out of the forest different, but the same. A testament, too, to the way we tell stories as a way to process the cataract of tsuris that is being alive.
3. To Live and Die in LA (1985)
There are no good guys in this film, and there is no happy ending. But there’s fire and fucking and rain and car chases and homoeroticism and sunsets and they just don’t make movies like this any more. I don’t want anything about 2026 to feel like living in this film, but I want more movies in 2026 to feel like this movie. Maybe all I need to feel okay in this life is William Petersen in some cowboy boots and a deep v-neck.
2. Michael Clayton (2007)
Not just a perfectly structured and scripted film, also a prescient one. The landscape of corporate immorality has mushroomed since 2007, and now, perhaps, we all have moments of feeling like Arthur: knowing we’re not crazy at our core, even while those in power insist that what we’re seeing doesn’t exist.
1. All the President’s Men (1976)
I have always loved this film, and my love for it has only grown as the world it depicts has become ever more critically endangered. There is something so nostalgically painful about knowing there was a time in which journalism could change the political situation—in which hard work paid off—in which publishers would take a chance on a writer without a huge profile—in which people wanted to do the right thing—in which newspapers were printed and read and mattered—in which movies were shot by Gordon Willis—in which Robert Redford was alive—in which writing meant writing, without Grammarly, without AI, without Microsoft Word: with pencils and notepads and incredible human brains. But this movie exists, and human nature hasn’t really changed that fundamentally in the last 50 years, has it? I refuse to believe it has. In 2026, I am getting myself a legal pad.
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Frank Falisi
Staff Writer
What’s in a year? “The best films of 2025” have been here for longer—both Jia Zhangke’s Caught By the Tides and David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds debuted in May of 2024, at Cannes. Alongside Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day (a true 2025 release, if difficult to see outside of NYC and LA), these films are distinguished from their peers by how they expand and contract to mutate the medium rather than acquiesce to it. And while all are (or will be) available to stream, a spectator might be forgiven for thinking them less “2025” than, say, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners or Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, two big budget gestures from legible auteurs whose willingness to speak broadly “about our moment” and whose theatrical windows (and accompanying press materials) were oppressive enough so as to be thoroughly memorable as films from this year.
No writer has better articulated the mishmosh mental assault of EOY listmaking than Jonathan Rosenbaum, who used nearly every ‘Year-End’ list of his at the Chicago Reader to express frustration over what films are “eligible” for such collating. Mostly it’s a matter of motivations: “End-of-the-year press shows and openings,” Rosenbaum wrote in prelude to his 1997 list, “are problematic to begin with, tied as they are in many cases to eligibility for Oscars and critics’ prizes—which translate into advertising.” On the one hand, the desire to look beyond multiplex inevitability to highlight the underseen in need of championing. On the other, what material good comes from a coterie of those with access (professionally, geographically, or otherwise) discussing representative art as that which is largely inaccessible by the largest number of audience members?
As outlets and opportunities for criticism have continued to shutter and the line between PR and critique has blurred even further, maybe all we can do is write to what we’re most willing to rep while remaining—simultaneously, contradictively—on guard against personal canons that launder the interests of corporations and millionaires in the guise of reclamatory novelty, itself usually an act of self-advertising. My affection for James Cameron’s inchingly daffy and love-goggled Avatar: Fire and Ash is not insignificant, but we’ll save that for the next cup of coffee we share. What follows, then, is a sort-of alternative set of ‘Best’, a list of multi-form cultural objects (re)released in and around 2025 that cut against seeing a given year one way.
The Annihilation of Fish, Charles Burnett
Ella McKay, James L. Brooks
FELT, Blake Williams
From Ground Zero, Various
Life, Death, and Dennis Hopper, The Waterboys
Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love, Jodie Mack
Nuestra Tierra, Lucrecia Martel
Scorigami, Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein
Sick and Dirty, Michael Koresky
You Must Remember This (Expanded), Romance
Zodiac Killer Project, Charlie Shackleton
Fran Hoepfner
Longtime contributor & BW/DR alum
My Top Ten First Time Watches in 2025 (unranked):
Grey Gardens, dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Giffard, and Muffie Meyer (1975)
Noroi: The Curse, dir. Koji Shirashi (2005)
The Trial, dir. Orson Welles (1962)
The Searchers, dir. John Ford (1956)
Dog Movie, dir. Henry Hanson (2023)
Funny Pages, dir. Owen Kline (2022)
Stranger by the Lake, dir. Alain Guiraudie (2013)
The Village, dir. M. Night Shyamalan (2004)
The Ghost Writer, dir. Roman Polanski (2010)
Revelations of Divine Love, dir. Caroline Golum (2025)
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Sarah Welch-Larson
Staff Writer
These are the movies I watched for the first time this year that grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. This list is unranked.
Nostalghia (1983, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) — streaming on Criterion Channel
Tarkovsky traces the line between faith and doubt with light and shadow and the ever-present flow of water. Add fire and wind and the sudden flutter of doves’ wings and you’ve got a kind of alchemy.
The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold) — DCP at the Toronto International Film Festival
An ecstatic portrait of religious idealism, embodied by Celia Rowlson-Hall’s choreography and realized by Amanda Seyfried’s lead performance.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, dir. Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied) — streaming
We’re all searching for something. The question is what it will do to us when we find it.
Black Bag (dir. Steven Soderbergh) — DCP at AMC Newcity
Brisk and witty, an exploration of what it’s like to maintain a moral core in an amoral context. You have to have something outside of yourself to anchor to.
Blue (1993, dir. Derek Jarman) — 35mm at True/False Film Festival
Hit me like the sky, like a wave, like the chime of a meditation bell.
WTO/99 (dir. Ian Bell) — DCP at True/False Film Festival
The best documentary of the year, WTO/99 is an autopsy of the World Trade protests in Seattle from every angle, assembled entirely from archival footage. Rage and idealism punctuated by jackboots; same as it ever was.
It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi) — DCP at the Toronto International Film Festival
Same as it ever was. A mirror on the past, a prophecy of the future, the tell-tale heart squeaking out its judgmental little song.
In the Mouth of Madness (1994, dir. John Carpenter) — streaming on Criterion Channel
A Möbius strip linking the creative instinct and a selfish impulse.
The Player (1992, dir. Robert Altman) — DCP at the Gene Siskel Film Center
Movies! Now more than ever! I love how vulnerable Tim Robbins plays this, even and especially when he’s being a real heel.
Wake Up Dead Man (dir. Rian Johnson) — DCP at the Toronto International Film Festival
Speaks out loud what’s been on my heart for years. It’s not a game; it’s a shot at grace and redemption for “those who deserve it least and need it most.”
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Bryan Miller
Frequent Contributor
A Year-End List Of Endings
I keep a rolling list of my favorite films throughout the year, and a clear trend emerged from the 2025 crop: With one notable exception, these are movies about the end of something, whether those endings are inevitable or inevitably elusive. It’s appropriate in a year—and, so far, a decade—when the end of so many things seems nigh. These are my ten favorites of 2025 (technically including a couple 2024 releases, but everything below was made widely available this year) and their relationship to The End.
The man-children meet their final fate in Vulcanizadora, the zenith of Joel Potrykus and Joshua Burge’s Losercore cinema. This is semi-officially a sequel to Buzzard, their 2014 collaboration, but it’s very much also a spiritual follow-up to their films Ape and even the slovenly surrealistic anti-epic Relaxer. After a wasted lifetime of refusing to start—much less finish—anything, Burge’s character is serious about fulfilling a mysterious, preposterous pact the two made years before, which forces Potrykus’ character to do that which he is most afraid of: confront consequences. These two hapless doofuses spent several movies fucking around; now we all get to find out. Indie cinema is alive and thriving, and it’s in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The best part of Weapons is the ending—chaotic, kinetic, and absolutely thrilling—and it’s also a lie. The real power of Weapons is the absolute unknowability of this small-town tragedy that claimed a classroom full of children, for whom no amount of thoughts and prayers will suffice. What makes Weapons a popcorn movie is that Zach Cregger relents and ultimately gives us, and its characters, a definitive answer, with a solution attainable through following a set of rules and procedures. That catharsis is a favor Cregger does for us on the way out the door, a darkly soothing bit of deception.
David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is about a widower, played by an especially Cronenbergian Vincent Cassell, who can’t stop obsessing over what happens after the ending. To that effect, he’s created a high-tech cemetery where mourners can watch their loved ones decompose on a 24/7 video feed. The death of Cronenberg’s own wife no doubt inspired not just the story but the depth of feeling in the film, which, true to form by the Canadian master, is still rigorously artful, mordantly funny, and brilliantly elliptical.
Secret Mall Apartment is a vibrant, surprising, total delight of a documentary chronicles the medium-busting efforts of a group of eight artists from Rhode Island who are resilient in the face of a devastating ending — namely, the destruction of their beloved artists warehouse lofts to build an enormous shopping mall. They respond by blending performance art, anti-capitalist subterfuge, and just plain old mischief by building a secret apartment inside the materialist behemoth and living there on and off for several years. How they do it is jaw-dropping. Why they do it is even more illuminating.
Capitalism might not be going so well, Kiyoshi Kurosawa suggests in Cloud, a movie about a drop-shipper whose willingness to participate in a corrupt system drags him violently toward an inevitable fate. The fact that he’s not really doing anything much worse than the average savvy businessperson should in no way make us feel better. And speaking of endings, the last half hour of Cloud is breathlessly mad.
The major exception on this list is Richard Linklatter’s Nouvelle Vague, which, true to its name, is utterly obsessed with beginnings, with the new. The movie follows Jean Luc Goddard, who fears his film career may be over before it’s even started as he struggles to make his first feature, Breathless. Of course, we know from the comfortable perch of hindsight that Goddard is only getting started. We also know that the French New Wave long ago crested and crashed, but that’s of no concern in Nouvelle Vague, which is absolutely giddy with the power of invention.
Train Dreams might well be the most beautiful movie of 2025. This adaptation of Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella feels overtly literary, with its introspective voiceover, and almost ostentatiously Malickian in its dreamy photography. But director Clint Bentley just keeps sticking the landing in this meditative but also briskly paced life story of a logger, played by Joel Edgerton, who endures hardship and tragedy as antiquity rushes forward to meet the oncoming new millennium. Can our lives only be understood looking back from near the end? This one is.
A bad ending can be better than no ending at all. The ending of Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent certainly isn’t bad. It’s terrific, in fact. But Wagner Moura’s protagonist, a widower in exile living in an apartment for refugees and would-be political prisoners in the Brazilian city of Recife in the late 1970s, can’t move forward until he gets closure on the ghosts of the past in a country still terrorized by a corrupt military dictatorship. The Secret Agent is a deliberately paced, expansive, character-driver crime film highlighted by a tremendous performance from Moura and the apex (so far) of Filho’s ability to marry gritty realism with astonishing flashes of surrealism.
Sometimes an ending is preferable. That’s the conclusion Preacher Boy reaches in the waning moments of Sinners—in a post-credit sequence after the movie is technically over, no less. Ryan Coogler’s opus of vampires, appropriation, and Black art is the best popcorn movie of the year, but it’s also something more. Its success, both creative and financial, has inspired some calls for a sequel or prequel; apparently those people left the theater right when the credits rolled and missed Preacher Boy’s final homily.
It is so over. For some of us, anyway, and that’s okay. Leonardo DiCaprio’s over-the-hill revolutionary is having trouble letting go in One Battle After Another, and the past he’s obsessed with does indeed come back to haunt him. Paul Thomas Anderson is here to tell us that everything old is new again — it’s right there in the title. The fact that he was able to so deftly adapt a 35-year-old Thomas Pynchon novel into the defining movie of 2025 speaks to the endlessness of the fight against fascism and authoritarianism. But that also means new beginnings for a new generation, as represented by Chase Infiniti’s burgeoning activist. That ray of optimism amidst the scruffy, dark comedy and stark tragedy is what makes the best film of 2025 as deeply satisfying as a few small beers.
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Russell Nichols
Frequent Contributor
Slop. It sounds like a soaked washcloth plopping against a cold, tiled floor. From zany videos and off-kilter ads to copy-and-paste (cap) books, AI-generated content has mercilessly taken over our screens, which is why Merriam-Webster chose “slop” as the 2025 Word of the Year.
“The word sends a little message to AI,” wrote Merriam-Webster’s human editors. “When it comes to replacing human creativity, sometimes you don’t seem too superintelligent.”
In response to the digital swamp of fakery, I present my top five realest moments in film this year. Each selection is a scene or slice of dialogue that felt authentic, undeniably timely and honest to me, a real-life human being.
5. Every Truth a Lie (Black Bag)
“When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?” asks a young agent (Marisa Abela) halfway through this low-key high-stakes spy thriller.
Screenwriter David Koepp says the dialogue was inspired by his talks with an intelligence officer. In a film where monogamy is called “flagrant” and marital devotion a “professional weakness,” this line resonates as the rhetorical question of our time.
4. You Break It, You Buy It (Weapons)
The principal (Benedict Wong) is coming in hot, like a bloody-faced, human-seeking missile. Justine (Julia Garner), the embattled schoolteacher, is his target. He gets slammed by a father into a fridge of Liquid Death drink, but rises again, relentlessly chasing her through a gas station convenience store.
This is, of course, not convenient for the clerk, who yells: “Get out of my store!”
“Fucking help me!” the schoolteacher hollers back on her way out.
3. Which Way Does The Hump Go? (The Woman in the Yard)
For Danielle Deadwyler, it’s all in the eyes. Her penetrating gaze is impossible to look away from, unflinching and unblinking, windows to a tragic, tormented soul. Here, she plays Ramona, a widow and single mom on crutches trying to raise two kids while broke and tired.
After a mysterious woman appears in their yard, the house turns into a high-powered pressure cooker. In this scene, she boils over. She snatches a ball from her son, throws it outside and scolds her daughter for writing an ‘R’ the wrong way. “The hump goes to the right,” she corrects over and over with a look that could kill.
2. Dave and Alison in a Compromising Position (Together)
A real-life married couple play a fictional married couple who find themselves sharing more than a joint. The climax is what stands out to me here, poetic in form and function, surprising but inevitable. And consummately in my conceptual wheelhouse.*
(*spoiler adjacent: Flesh of My Flesh, 580 Split, April 2022.)
1. That Boy Can Sang (Sinners)
Psychologist Dacher Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” Director Ryan Coogler alchemizes this idea into 65mm gold later in the film (you know the scene). But the realest moment for me happens earlier.
I went in completely blind. No trailers, no summaries. I didn’t even know Michael B. Jordan was playing twins. So in the car, when blues guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) sings for the first time, Stack (Jordan) turns to him with the exact same expression my soul made. Like Jordan was hearing that voice for the first time too. A voice too real to be harvested.
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Abigail Oswald
Frequent Contributor
One of the great joys of my movie-watching journey has been finding actors whose work I love and just following them through the stories they choose to tell over the course of their lives. Even if I don’t end up loving every watch, I still enjoy myself because I’m looking for the connections between those roles and stories. Writing aboutDead Poets Society earlier this year inspired me to embark on a quest to watch as many Robert Sean Leonard movies as I can, so I thought I’d share three RSL favorites from my 2025:
Dead Poets Society: If you’re a person who writes in 2026, let me be the one to tell you that you’re due for a rewatch! I get such a kick out of returning to movies I’ve seen countless times and still somehow finding new things to love; it’s so cool to me that art can keep giving like that.
My Best Friend Is a Vampire: This goofy ’80s delight holds up surprisingly well, and RSL’s benevolent movie parents offer a nice change of pace from his usual unsupportive movie dads. An amusing take on the question that so often haunts supernatural teen movies: Is this symptom just puberty, or is it part of my supernatural evolution?
In the Gloaming: RSL and Glenn Close shine as a mother-son duo grappling with RSL’s impending death in Christopher Reeve’s directorial debut. One of the most wonderful things about filmmaking is its collaborative nature—all these different human beings coming together in a particular moment in time to create a story that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. You can really feel the shared humanity pulsing within In the Gloaming. Finding movies like that in the coming years will be more important than ever.If you’re having a rough year, the consistency of a particular actor—of any art, really—can feel like such a comfort. I’m excited to see what my next year of RSL holds!
Chad Perman
Founder/Editor-in-Chief
10. The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer)
Sitting in a packed movie theater on a summer afternoon with my teenage son and laughing out loud with everyone else around us at a Naked Gun movie up on the big screen, just like I once sat with my own Dad doing the very same thing many moons ago, felt like a magical kind of movie time travel/full circle moment that I’ll keep close to me forever. And now, maybe more than ever, I think we all might benefit from sitting a little more often in crowded movie theaters laughing together and remembering just how good that feels, the momentary community and escapism of it all.
9. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)
Eva Victor’s first film is tender and thoughtful, heartbreaking and hilarious, an empathetic and honest depiction of how trauma can ripple out over many years, and how healing gradually, hopefully works. An impressive and heartfelt debut, with a single scene from John Carroll Lynch that was maybe one of the best I saw all year.
8. Splitsville (Michael Angelo Covino)
Had no real idea what Splitsville was going into it, and was continually delighted to realize I could never quite figure out where it might be heading, and that it was actually, genuinely, chaotically funny and surprising and all over the place. I’m not saying it’s Lubitsch or Sturges exactly, but if either of those directors were to make a movie in 2025, it might end up feeling a whole lot like this. Also: viva physical comedy!
7. The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
Not the best Wes maybe, but still very good Wes, which is always a gift to receive in any moviegoing year. Intricate storytelling, meticulous production design, funny as hell but with very serious, moral/mortal anxieties at its core (I swear at times I was even feeling…Ingmar Bergman vibes), and an all-time performance from Benicio del Toro, which somehow was only his second best performance of 2025.
6. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
The only reason this one isn’t even higher on the list isn’t the film or its filmmaker’s fault; it’s entirely on me and my general disinterest in (or perhaps anxious avoidance of?) most horror movies, which is not something I’m necessarily proud of, but something I do know to be true. So, even given my love for Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, I didn’t get around to seeing Sinners in theaters, which is a shame, because I can only imagine how much harder this would all hit on a big screen. But not to worry, it definitely still hits hard even on a decent-sized television screen at home. I knew very little going into it, but Coogler’s filmmaking and storytelling is so quickly immersive and sure-handed that it quickly drew me in; the first half blew me away and the second half, while not nearly as much my kind of thing, was still quite good. And the music of it all, my goodness.
5. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
When I was growing up it seemed like they released movies as good as this at least once a month, and often more—solid, taut, smart, well-made films with great performances from famous actors, a good night out at the movies etc—but given the general state of Hollywood and movie theaters the last decade or so, watching Black Bag feels a bit like an oasis in the desert, a cinematic unicorn, a ray of hope amidst the absolute dearth of competent, quality studio movies that we all took for granted for decades. Soderbergh makes it all look easy, which is not at all a criticism; I’ve argued since at least the early 2000s that he’s essentially a kind of Howard Hawks for our times, and here he’s operating in full-on confidently high-quality genre filmmaker mode. But in a world where that’s not really a thing any more, he now seems more like some kind of master craftsman/artist who returns every year or so to remind us of what an actual mid-budget movie made for adults can be—and of all that we’ve lost to streaming, “second screens,” franchises, and comic book movies.
4. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
So thankful to live in a universe where Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke have been making films together for over 30 years now, and really loved almost everything about Blue Moon; it’s generous in so many different directions, so good at appreciating little details, inner psychologies, and big ideas, so filled with melancholy and loneliness and porcupine dilemmas, so in love with words and storytelling and why art matters.
3. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Probably no surprise that this is a therapist’s dream of a movie, with so, so much to chew on, and I’m sure watching it after my first day back to work probably helped it hit even harder, but I also think Sentimental Value would resonate with most anybody who’s ever…had a family? Been a parent or a child? It gets so, so many things right, the big stuff and the small stuff, the performances and the music, the stylistic choices and framing devices, the family dynamics, the intergenerational transmission of trauma, the way life is so complicated, for all of us, and the way art can help, hurt, or heal as we try to make our way through it all.
2. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Easily the most beautiful and surprising new film I saw this year, and one filmed entirely here in Washington state, in and around places I’ve known for most of my life, looking as gorgeous as they’ve ever looked onscreen—this Malick-y adaptation (complimentary) of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella is a simple, meditative, immersive experience, tracing the life of a rather ordinary man (an extraordinary Joel Edgerton) living out a rather normal, if often difficult and lonely, ordinary life that begins near the turn of the century. The cumulative 80 year arc of the story, combined with sublime cinematography, Bryce Dessner’s poetic score, and Edgerton’s quiet performance, feels almost overwhelming at times, in the best possible ways.
1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
While Paul Thomas Anderson has never, to my mind, made a bad film, rarely have his storytelling interests overlapped all that much with the modern world (at least not since 1999’s Magnolia), let alone tapped into the cultural and political zeitgeist this directly. And while I’m not at all sure he set out to make a movie that would resonate as much as this one did, he nonetheless took a massive amount of studio money, put together an impeccable ensemble cast, and created a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland that both doubles as his version of an action movie and manages to capture a whole lot of what it felt like to live through 2025 in America.
Honorable Mentions: 28 Years Later, Eternity, F1, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Roofman, Wake Up Dead Man
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Spencer Williams
Staff Writer
10. The History of Sound
I watched this with my older sister and parents in a tiny theatre tucked away in Rockland, Maine. At three pivotal moments, my sister turned to me and whispered: “I’m confused” and each time I responded: “They’re gay, Jenny.” Perfect viewing experience. In my humble opinion, not enough is being said about Hadley Robinson’s truly incredible supporting performance. She anchors her scene with such depth and grief and care, it somehow made me forget how to breathe.
9. Sinners
I can’t stop thinking about the dancing sequence in this film. The camera glides across time, pulling so many histories of movement into the same room. It’s probably my favorite scene in a movie this year. Also, Hailee Steinfeld married Josh Allen this year. That has nothing to do with the film, but it gives me an opportunity to put “Go Bills!” in this writeup. Anyways, watching Sinners in a packed theatre was a peak theatrical experience, despite it occurring at a Regal (please put a heating option on your recliners). Nothing better than watching a horror film with a rambunctious crowd, and the woman at the register gave me an extra bag of jalapenos.
8. Train Dreams
I’m not a particularly earnest person. I have an allergy towards overt sentiment, and this is something I’m working on in therapy. That being said, Train Dreams got me. I cried. Joel Edgerton’s face makes me want to slam a teddy bear into a wall. His eyes say everything, even when nothing else is happening in a scene. People are calling this Malick-lite, and I have to say, I don’t see it. Is it because it looks great? Does Malick have a monopoly on good-looking cinematography? Also, Felicity Jones is a good actress. I said it and I meant it.
7. All That’s Left of You
Saw this during the Buffalo International Film Festival, which is as glitzy as it sounds. This film is a tear-jerking bludgeon (positive). Cherien Dabis, also the director, gives one of my favorite performances of the year—it reminded me a bit of Fernanda Torres’s performance in last year’s I’m Still Here. More please!
6. Twinless
Amazing chaos twink representation and even more amazing straight guy representation. An at times evil picture (a good thing, I swear). As an avid Teen Wolf fan in my youth (I’m 30), I always knew Dylan O’ Brien had the juice. Thank god Aisling Franciosi finally gets to have fun in a movie. Don’t let Quentin Tarantino see this.
7. The Perfect Neighbor
The most infuriating movie of 2025, and I saw this in January! The surveillance footage conceit really worked for me and didn’t feel gimmicky. There’s a scene here that almost made me turn my TV off, but I’m glad I didn’t. I can’t wait to never see this movie again (positive).
5. Peter Hujar’s Day
Gay guys be talking. Catnip to a hag like me.
4. Black Bag
After Presence, which I lowkey hated, I was nervous about this one. I shouldn’t have been. This is true Wig Flew cinema. An absolute ball. Marisa Abela has some of the best line deliveries of the year and is hereby forgiven for Back to Black. So campy. Not a single gay character on screen, and yet, here I am, gagging.
3. Sorry, Baby
A grand ol’ gutpunch of a film. Concise and beautiful. How amazing it is to have friends and a cat.
2. Sentimental Value
I love how contained this film feels. Each performance feels entirely necessary to the bones of the story, and it also looks great, minus one moment toward the end that made me jump out of my seat. If you know, you know.
1.If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne.
Honorable Mentions: Seeds, Bugonia, It Ends, The Mastermind, Predators, East of Wall, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), Marty Supreme (ugh), Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
***
Travis Woods
Contributing Editor
Due to a constellation of calamities and obligations in 2025, I was unable to see many new films. Of those I did: I loved One Battle After Another (more on that later in this issue for Bright Wall/Dark Room) and Sinners just like most everyone else, and quite enjoyed Spike Lee’s intentionally bifurcated and schizoid-schmaltzed Highest 2 Lowest just like most everyone else did not (argument: it’s his Body Double, in which the grittier second half comments upon the satirical artifice of the first).
I hope to atone for the cardinal sin of not having a Best of 2025 list in-hand by instead proffering my favorite films of the 21st century’s first quarter, a kind of 25-year grouping to make up for my lack of a Year ‘25 grouping.
25th Hour (dir. Spike Lee; 2002)
Spike’s angry wolf-whistle and haunted elegy for the 20th century, and for the New York City that died with it.
2046 (dir. Wong Kar-wai; 2004)
A sequel to In the Mood for Love that is somehow sadder, sexier, lovelier, and more ambitious than its predecessor in absolutely every way as it portraits the exquisite damnation of living in the memory motel of love’s absence.
Before Midnight (dir. Richard Linklater; 2013)
One hell of a night (and sequel, and trilogy, and epilogue).
Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee; 2005)
The burden of dreams.
The Counselor (dir. Ridley Scott; 2013)
Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy’s drug-dusted and Grand Guignol soap opera for the end times (more thoughts on this here).
Decision to Leave (dir. Park Chan-wook; 2022)
“Did I dream, you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?
Now my foolish heart is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks
For you sing,
‘Touch me not, touch me not
Come back tomorrow’
Oh, my heart
Oh, my heart shies from the sorrow
Well, I’m as puzzled as a newborn child
I’m as riddled as the tide
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or should I lie with death my bride?”
Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg; 2007)
The histories of violence that are writ and wrought and inked and etched upon our skin—Cronenberg’s truest body horror.
Femme (dir. Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping; 2023)
Absolutely stunning queer erotic thriller that utilizes genre convention to interrogate love, sex, and identity, only to discover that our hearts ultimately betray us as horrifically as our fears.
Hot, though.
Femme Fatale (dir. Brian De Palma; 2002)
Only De Palma would bounce back from a career slump by attempting to outdo David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive with a horny visual essay that reorients the POV of film noir into the minds of the women who have always lurked in the genre’s shadows; not so much a return to form as it is the fullest, most absolute expression of the form itself, stretching it to its outer limits so as to encompass nearly everything that the form can possibly contain. Not even God could make a film this good.
Green Room (dir. Jeremy Saulnier; 2015)
“This…is a nightmare.”
“For us all.”
Pulp as prophecy, prophecy as pulp. The film of our time.
In the Cut (dir. Jane Campion; 2003)
A sensorial acid bath of abstract memories and sensations (the ellipses of rain on a windshield, summer-hot sheets tangled in bed, a foot curled upward during sex) that pool together like clues in a traumnovelle noir about danger, desire, and the lure of both.
Inherent Vice (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson; 2014)
I’ve said my piece on PTA’s finest film—in which the death of a counter-culture is presented as a metaphor for the confused and aching end to a messy love affair—both here and here.
Mad Max: Fury Road (dir. George Miller; 2015)
What we mean when we say “pure cinema”; a popcorn movie for a broken world, in which George Miller utilizes everything that shouldn’t work—a long-delayed sequel for an aging IP that replaces its franchise-defining star with a mumbly weirdo and washes it all in broad, digitally-enhanced strokes of teal and orange—to create what may be the most viscerally exciting theatrical experience of the 21st century.
Mandy (dir. Panos Cosmatos; 2018)
A catalogue both lyrical and lysergic of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our universe together (more on this here).
Miami Vice (dir. Michael Mann; 2006)
The heist of the century, in which Michael Mann hijacks the IP he helped make famous in order to finally wrench the subtext of his filmography into pure text: he is a melodramatist, and his films are blood-hot studies of how we crave the love that will disintegrate the personas we have built to protect ourselves from the worlds we operate within.
Mulholland Drive (dir. David Lynch; 2001)
Lynch’s most beautiful visual poem about the horror of self and death; less a mystery to be solved than it is a dream to be experienced.
No Country for Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen; 2007)
Tex-Mexistentialism.
O.J.: Made in America (dir. Ezra Edelman; 2016)
Not the trial of the American Century, but the American Century on trial.
Revanche (dir. Götz Spielmann; 2008)
A neo-noir without any interest in crime, a melodrama with no concern for theatrics, this is ultimately a series of interlocking character studies as empathetic as it is irresolute; a kind of Magnolia for those of us who keep pulp paperbacks in our back pockets.
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (dir. Quentin Tarantino; 2019)
The Last Movie. (More here)
Uncut Gems (dir. Josh and Benny Safdie; 2019)
A skull-rattling cokesnort of cosmic humanism (more thoughts here).
Under the Silver Lake (dir. David Robert Mitchell; 2018)
A film that will only further irritate the people who mistook the supposed mythology of Mitchell’s It Follows monster—a mythology that was only shared by confused and terrified idiot teenagers, mind you—as well as the final stand against It, as “plot holes”; in both films, our misunderstanding of their characters’ miscommunications is the point.
Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer; 2013)
Alienation.
You Were Never Really Here (dir. Lynne Ramsay; 2017)
Haunting and luminously textured, the haptic expressionism of which violently disrupts the tropes that underpin the damaged-man-saves-helpless-girl movie. (I have more to say here)
Zodiac (dir. David Fincher; 2007)
Rather elegant that Fincher’s film about the ultimate unknowability of any other human being also serves as a scathing self-portrait by which we can know him.