My Top 10 Films of 2025

I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “bad movie year.” There are a zillion movies released each year! You’ll find a bunch you love if you take the time to dig through them. For this year, I guess I just haven’t spent enough time digging yet, because I did kind of struggle to round out a full list of picks that truly amazed, enchanted, and haunted, though in the end I think I got there. As always, many 2025 independent and international releases will only find their way to me in the fullness of time, but right now, these are my favourites.

10. Eden

Call it the Ronaissance. Having cast aside the important-movie pretentions of stinkers like A Beautiful Mind or Cinderella Man, director Ron Howard, that old-school Hollywood journeyman, has been indulging in juicy B-movie fare for the past 20-ish years, and knocking out banger after banger: Rush (endlessly rewatchable), In the Heart of the Sea (gee-whiz!), Solo (imo the best Star Wars movie), Thirteen Lives (my favourite American film of 2022), Hillbilly Elegy (oh wait shit no we’re pretending that one doesn’t exist). Now we have Eden, a certified flop, not a mesmerizing achievement like Thirteen Lives, but fun as hell, a ripped-from-the-100-year-old-headlines interwar melodrama of Europeans feuding on a Galapagos island, full of intrigue, thrills, twists, broad philosophising, and preposterous fake accents. Just a salacious, pulpy trash thriller that you can’t peel your eyes from.

9. The Smashing Machine

Minor spoilers for the rest of the list: I think Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is the best film made by one or more Safdie brother since 2014’s Heaven Knows What. Do not expect zany hijinks rattling around at the velocity of a ping-pong ball: Benny instead embraces a fairly traditional biopic structure, and attentively contemplative pacing, for this portrait of Mark Kerr, an early mixed-martial-arts champion. The “Dwayne Johnson” Rock incarnates Kerr not with the explosive woundedness, bluster, and violence we’ve come to expect from onscreen fighters, but with the cordial, forced even-temperedness of a man guarding a caged interiority that’s he’s long lost hope of expressing. I’ll hand the film a demerit for the sexist implication that Kerr’s losses were the result of his girlfriend (Emily Blunt) bugging him too much, but this unfortunate angle tracks with the perspective of a man who simply can’t integrate his everyday life into the work that gives him meaning. The Smashing Machine’s secret message (and critique of how capitalism forces us to pretend we love our jobs) is that Kerr has convinced himself he’s addicted to winning in the ring, when he’s actually addicted to the camaraderie of his male coworkers. A Dudes Rock tragedy.

8. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Now, Mary Bronstein’s new feature, her first since 2008’s indie classic Yeast, does have the frantic, anxious pacing and asshole characters that we’ve come to expect from the Bronstein-Safdie universe (her husband, Ronald Bronstein, director of Frownland, has collaborated on all the Safdie Brothers films). But unlike the male-focussed Safdie pics, If I Had Legs is both intensely feminist and intensely Freudian. A queasy nightmare horror-comedy of being umbilically tied to your child, the only way out for our hero Linda (Rose Byrne, who’s incredible) is to flip the polarity of a life-destroying interdependency doomed to turn every loved one into a burden.

7. Eephus

Dudes being guys.

6. Jay Kelly

I feel like nobody gives a shit about this movie other than me? I sort of get that: it’s a very conventional, even hoary, self-regarding Hollywood picture. Ohhh, the rich, ageing actor man (George Clooney, looking disconcertingly like Burt Lancaster) needs to reflect on what’s important in his life, wow, so groundbreaking. But it’s a thing I like. Noah Baumbach’s light-touch direction, and the joke-rich, humanist script, cowritten with Emily Mortimer, is funny and likable to me, and I was moved to think about how a life is refracted through a thousand others, yet ultimately no more than a passing cloud of dust in a flickering light. Unlike contemporary fare such as Sentimental Value, which is married to the over-therapized idea of everyone’s character being defined by their internal relationship to their own grief/trauma, Baumbach’s work continues to show people as defined by their external relationships with other people: how they choose to phrase that thought, how they react to an admission or reproach. Plus, the supporting cast is really good; welcome back, Stacy Keach, the screen has missed you.

5. Nouvelle Vague

Just super charming. Richard Linklater’s comic dramatization of how Jean-Luc Godard made Breathless in 1959 is deceptively light and silly, but also feels like a joyful manifesto for how to make art the right way: The triumph of an engaged, principled mind when it vibes with, rather than fighting against, the world as it exists, taking each impediment as an opportunity, each collaborator as a gift.

4. Peter Hujar’s Day

I have no particular interest in New York’s art scene of the 1970’s, but I am deeply interested in how this one little recitation of one day in the life of one person in that scene has survived 50 years and become a sort of totem for director Ira Sachs, who stages its telling as though it were the only surviving proof that the world is real and alive. The richly-textured film grain, and occasional experimental interludes, helped me to access the director’s mysterious fascination, turning one guy lounging around an apartment and prattling on about photographing Allen Ginsberg or whatever into a kind of meditative incantation on what it means to live how and when you do.

3. The Secret Agent

The Secret Agent is a fun thriller dripping with B-movie charms. The Secret Agent is a principled and realistic tale of life under oppression. These alternate identities of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 1977-set Brazilian drama don’t oppose but augment one another. When reality is robbed of rigidity by the political circumstances undermining your life, storytelling becomes an important thread you use to weave existence into a cohesive whole. For that reason, Mendonça’s incorporation of trusty genre-film conventions, worn smooth like pebbles on the beach, help the lives of his rich roster of misfits feel truer than they would in a directly naturalist telling.

2. One Battle After Another

I have reservations about Paul Thomas Anderson’s thorny, messy, fascinating latest. But I don’t have reservations about calling it the richest and most exciting American film of the year. It’s just a lot of movie.

1. Afternoons of Solitude

Have you ever caught the expression on the face of a mouse, maybe surprised in the act of scurrying along a kitchen floor? Chillingly naked stress, and shivering, bug-eyed fear. You feel like you’re seeing the exposed face of the world, and it’s horrible. That’s how I felt staring at the bizarre facial expressions of Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, as he faces down a series of enraged animals, themselves being horribly tortured, again and again, in this utterly unforgettable, awful, and haunting documentary by Albert Serra. Nothing else like it.