By Jared Rasic/Last Word Features
Every year, when it’s time to make my end-of-the-year list, I realize there are still too many new releases that I’ve yet to see, which is somewhat ridiculous since I managed to catch around 150 movies from 2025. That’s plenty. With all the new shows I tried to catch, I once again failed to make any new friends or go on many hikes, but I still had a wonderful time expanding my brain into several new and strange directions. With that said, let’s look at the Best TV Shows and Movies I watched in 2025.
Television
Most of these shows I watched on one streaming service or another, but life has conditioned me to call them TV shows and not streaming content, so here we are. A few shows I enjoy haven’t had their season finale yet, so I suppose they could completely fall apart by then, but I doubt it. Here are the six best shows (and some outliers) that I watched in 2025:
I Just Can’t Even with This Show: “The Studio.”
Most Disappointing New Seasons: “Only Murders in the Building” and “The White Lotus.”
Most Underrated New Season: “The Bear.”
Worst in Show: “All’s Fair” — You know I’m right.
Honorable Mentions: “Task,” “Common Side Effects,” “The Rehearsal,” “The Lowdown,” “Long Story Short,” “Alien: Earth,” “Paradise,” and “Death By Lightning.”
Favorite shows of the year:
“The Chair Company:” This series won’t work for everyone, but if you’re attuned to the very specific comedic wavelength of Tim Robinson and team, you’ll find this absurdist Lynchian comedic conspiracy thriller to be a work of boundless imagination (and endlessly quotable non-sequiturs).
“Andor: Season 2” By making the Empire a coldly cruel bureaucracy, it becomes scarier than it has ever been. “Andor” proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that “Star Wars” doesn’t need space wizards to be iconic and important.
“Severance: Season Two”: The rabbit hole of this show just keeps going deeper, and I can’t wait to see where it ends. Unpredictable in the best ways.
“Pluribus:” After Vince Gilligan blessed us with “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” he earned our trust. Luckily, “Pluribus” sees him working on a grand canvas that beautifully balances science fiction, comedy, and powerfully dramatic character work. Worth subscribing to AppleTV just for this and “Severance.”
“The Pitt:” Noah Wyle gave my favorite performance on TV this year with such a lived-in and nuanced portrait of an emergency room doctor suffering from PTSD and heaps of trauma. 15 absolutely unmissable hours of television, and I can’t wait for Season 2.
Best in Show:
“Adolescence:” Four hours, four unbroken takes following the arrest of a 13-year-old boy for the murder of a female classmate. Genuinely important and timely, “Adolescence” carries lesson after lesson in how to treat our children. A mesmerizing work of art.
MOVIES
I wanted to write a Top 10, but I failed because too much sweet cinematic goodness was left out. Honestly, 2025 is one of the best years we’ve had in cinema for quite some time (maybe since 2007), so I made a Top 15.
15: “Bugonia:” Yorgos Lanthimos makes movies that speak to me because my brain is filled with fish-eye lenses and Dutch angles just like his, but “Bugonia” somehow manages to not only be his weirdest movie to date, but also his most accessible. Emma Stone literally gets better with every performance, and I’m not sure we’ve remotely seen what she has in store for us.
14: “Rabbit Trap:” Dev Patel, Rosy McEwan, and Jade Croot are absolutely flawless in this revisionist bit of folklore that most critics and audience members found boring or weird. Personally, no film in history has ever given off better lo-fi, Welsh faerie folk vibes, and I’m completely here for it. It will eventually gain a massive cult following of people I want to be friends with.
13: “Hamnet:” This could have been emotionally manipulative misery porn, but instead it’s a psychologically searing tear-jerker that re-contextualizes Hamlet against the backdrop of a deeply mourning pair of star-crossed lovers. None of this movie plays without the hauntingly empathetic eye of director Chloé Zhao and the career-best work from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.
12: “Black Bag” — Steven Soderbergh makes his best movie in years with this swooningly romantic spy thriller shot through with so much restless grace as to remind audiences that movies for grown-ups not only still exist, but can thrive in the right hands. My favorite onscreen marriage of the year.
11: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You:” Featuring a fearless performance from Rose Byrne and tonally ambitious work from director Mary Bronstein, “Legs” is suffused with the anxious intensity of something like “Uncut Gems,” but then concentrated onto the overwhelming brutalities of motherhood. I don’t begrudge anyone who found this one overly oppressive, but the glimmer of hope at the end left me feeling optimistic and, surprisingly, touched.
10: “Sinners:” Michael B. Jordan is revelatory as twin brothers Smoke and Stack in this horny vampire tale set in the Jim Crow South. But the effortlessly cool direction of Ryan Coogler and the grimy, sweaty blues score from Ludwig Göransson steal the show. A popcorn blockbuster, the way Hollywood used to make them.
9: “Sentimental Value:” Cinema with a capital C, Joachim Trier channels Bergman in this powerful attempt to bridge the gap between fathers, daughters, and the silences between them. This will win some serious Oscars and deserves every one…even if just for the final scene alone.
8: “Eddington:” 2025’s most misunderstood film isn’t just an uncomfortable and irritable look at the individual miseries of 2020, but a sunburned fit of anger structured around a hilarious revisionist western, then nervously imploded into an Ari Aster panic attack. Long after I’m dead, “Eddington” will be taught alongside “Network” and “Strangelove” as one of the pinnacles of cinematic satire.
7: “Blue Moon:” The most I’ve loved a Richard Linklater film in ages, “Blue Moon” feels like an unhinged and painfully romantic play that sprung to life in front of you while you’re trying not to drink your fifth gin & tonic at your favorite speakeasy. At turns life-affirming and mordantly sad, Ethan Hawke is so damn good in this that it feels like watching a genius piano player finally letting you see how he moves his hands across the keys.
6: “Weapons:” The most fun I had in a theater all year. Unpredictable and insane while walking a razor-tipped tightrope between popcorn entertainment and thought-provoking seriousness. Both breathtaking and awe-inspiring, “Weapons” reignited in me the feeling of being drunk on the freedom and limitlessness of cinema.
5: “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl:” Not enough people have seen this anguished wail for the generations of women who’ve lived entire lives without a solitary moment of agency. What makes “Guinea Fowl” a masterpiece is that it isn’t just a lament for the women bent and broken by 1,000 years plus of the patriarchy, but that it also functions as a shout of alarm for young women to burn these customs to the ground before spending a life chained by them. Cinema as righteous protest and rage-fueled fury.
4: “No Other Choice:” Park Chan-wook is one of the best to ever do it, and “No Other Choice” sees him at his most deliciously cynical, dipping his toes into slapstick comedy, pitch-black satire, and white-knuckle thriller with the ease he has shown as a technical master for decades. This is Park’s “Fargo,” and I can’t recommend it enough.
3: “Cloud:” What happens when your online life shows up at your door, angry and armed? Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of the world’s finest living filmmakers, and “Cloud” is one of his best. Quiet, contemplative, and then explosive, it’s a film of such deceptively simple power that I’m not sure this shouldn’t have been my #1 movie of the year. This is now one of the standards I’ll use when I call a movie a “masterpiece.”
2: “Train Dreams:” Denis Johnson was one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and “Train Dreams” was his perfect ode to America. Clint Bentley turns that lovely story into a poem for the Pacific Northwest, radiating a gentle beauty into the soil of an America long past. Joel Edgerton is without equal as a quiet logger in the early 19th century, but it’s William H. Macy who does so much with so little, crafting the soul of Arn Peeples, my favorite character of the year, with a limitless grace.
1: “One Battle After Another” — An action movie, a family drama, a can of pepper spray to the face of ICE, and a fist fight at dawn, “One Battle” is a singular work of art from Paul Thomas Anderson, a great American provocateur. One of the very few films I’ve seen that can be labelled as perfect: from the never better DiCaprio, the infuriatingly hilarious Sean Penn, and the immediately iconic Benicio del Toro and his few small beers, there is no other film on this list that I will watch more or love as deeply.