The Top Movies of 2025

In a world on fire, movies continue to provide solace and comfort as a realm for infinite fantasy.  Where the Christmas Adventurers Club can exist in the same year as Blues music fighting the KKK.  Where demons are hunted through the power of Kpop and a demonic snowman is destroyed by Liam Neeson.  It’s a realm that contains Denzel Washington rapping to A$ap Rocky, Tom Hanks impeccably playing basketball, and David Paymer putting challah bread on a corpse.  For me, movies continue to be eternal and the movie theatre holds a spiritual power.  Due to life circumstances, I watched far less current films than in previous years, but was wowed by what I did see.  Any film in my top five is better than the majority of films from 2024.  It was a good year.  

One glaring omission:  Sentimental Value.  I wasn’t able to see this in the theaters and haven’t made time to see it at home.  It’ll have to count as a 2026 film. 

Top Ten Films of 2025

10.  Weapons/All The Empty Rooms 

An unfortunate pairing due to subject matter here in the ten spot.  Weapons is a brilliantly-constructed horror movie about, among other things, the weaponization of our children within culture.  All the Empty Rooms is a short documentary about photographing the left empty rooms of children killed in school shootings.  Weapons is wonderfully acted filling the screen with vision and sound, while All the Empty Rooms is sparse, void of sound. 

9.  Kpop Demon Hunters 

Yes, I actually watched another animated movie.  My only one for the year and I was thoroughly entertained.  Great Kpop music with a somewhat simple and predictable story.  The movie is saved by great vocal acting and really charismatic leads.  It falls into the Moana trap of having silly animal sidekicks without much purpose, but I cannot deny that I’ve rewatched the final twenty minutes over ten times.  The perfect pick-me-up for our trying times.  We’re Golden! 

8.  F1 

My feel-good movie of the year.  Light on plot, heavy on filmmaking.  A great cinematic experience.  The final “flight” sequence is breathtaking in cinematic glory.  Enjoyable leads - give me Javier Bardem in this part ten times over.  Also Kerry Condon is phenomenal when she’s allowed to speak in her actual accent (see Train Dreams for when she isn’t).

7. Hamnet 

For me, Hamnet struggles under the weight of its two literary predecessors.  Unfortunately, I finished the Maggie O’Farrell book too close to the film and couldn’t remove my adoration for the novel from the adaptation to the screen.  The first hour of the film struggled under that weight.  However, once Jacobi Jupe appears as Hamnet, we’re off to the races.  The final thirty minutes are my favorite thing I’ve seen on film since 2023.  The idea that offstage could represent Heaven is equally powerful and brilliant.  Everything that happens inside The Globe Theatre is why we go to the movies.  Two films in one for me, with the latter being a masterpiece.  

6.  Come See Me in The Good Light 

A documentary on the end of life of Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson.  I’m ashamed that it took until this film for me to read their poetry.  A stunningly beautiful film about the cycles we fight through as we fight for our lives.  Their struggles are felt, their love is so present, and their writing sings through the film clippings on screen.  I loved this movie and will plan to revisit it in the years to come.  Equally parts hopeful and tragic.  

5. It Was Just an Accident 

Jahfar Panahi’s groundbreaking work about torture and deception in Iran.  If you’ve ever seen Death and The Maiden this is the better version of that film.  Real and raw at all times.  The acting is less performed and more exorcised.  Despite its terrible subject matter, humor comes through the seams.  This goes down as one of the weirdest “friends on a roadtrip” films ever made.  Also the supporting performance by Mariam Afshari is one of my top five performances of the year.  This film will stick with you long after the credits roll.  

4.  Train Dreams 

In a movie this soft and atmospheric with our modern attention span dwindling, you have to grab me in the first 10 minutes. As we emerge out of a train tunnel into a wooded paradise we are met by Will Patton’s storied voice which both soothes and attracts. The camera mounted on a falling tree, the boots nailed into another. These are the images that will stick with me from the year. We’ve been invited into folklore and the phone goes away, the eyes focus.  Hauntingly beautiful, careful in storytelling and song, I loved Train Dreams.  It’s less of a film and more of a quiet meditation on a life.  Joel Edgerton is wonderful and the cameo of the year performance goes to William H Macy.  

3.  Black Bag 

A sleek, sexy modern spy thriller with a dinner party sequence to die for.  Fassbender and Blanchett are on fire together and it's one of Soderbergh’s best films in years.  A modern Agatha Christie level spy thriller, with the thriller elements coming from tension rather than from action.  To say more would give away the film - but even if these lines don’t sell you, Tom Burke’s supporting role will.  

2.  Sinners 

Brilliant genre masterpiece.  My favorite soundtrack and score of the year.  The I Lied To You sequence doesn’t work for everything but it sure as shit works for me.  One of the most inventive sequences captured on film in decades.  Eat your heart out, Ryan Coogler.  Generational trauma on top of historical bias with a whole heaping helping of brilliant blues music.  Michael B Jordan as both Smoke and Stack gives the performance of his career.  Same goes for Wunmi Mosaku who was first brilliant in Lovecraft Country and Miles Caton - where did they find this gem?  Coogler is in a category with just a handful of other modern masters.  Sinners is brilliance in action.  

1.  One Battle After Another

Sometimes the Academy gets it right.  Sinners and One Battle After Another aren’t just chalk picks, they’re the best movies of the year.  One Battle is one of the best movies of the century.  Quotable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and hard-hitting.  An utterly brilliant script, PTA has outdone himself in adapting this story.  The final “car chase” is unlike anything I’ve seen on film.  You feel your heart beat with every bump in the road.  It feels like a cross between the Nuclear Test in Oppenheimer, the ending of Past Lives, and Caravan in Whiplash.  The score is unnerving and perfectly misshapen.  I LOVED the experience of watching One Battle.  From the visual magic of skateboarders on rooftops to the cops chasing after Del Toro and DiCaprio.  In a movie filled with nihilism and despair, when that Tom Petty kicks in, you realize, you too might have hope for the future.  One Battle tackles the oncoming abyss head on.