As December rolls around, film enthusiasts begin to reflect on the past twelve months, evaluating the biggest and best releases of the calendar cycle to determine how 2025 fares compared to previous years, including some of the greatest ones cinema has ever seen. Cinephiles committing to such an undertaking as they judge the quality of 2025 have a lot to digest, with everything from major studio blockbusters to brilliant international releases defining the brilliance of filmmaking in ’25.
The year has been as vast as it is varied, with the trend-setting movies featuring everything from soaring superheroes to harrowing horrors, iconic monsters, pulsating races, and even a particularly popular chicken jockey. To confine the greatness of 2025 cinema to just ten films is an impossible task, and the year’s best pictures will undoubtedly look very different when audiences reflect on the year in the future. As of right now, these ten marvelous movies are a huge reason why 2025 has been such a fantastic year of film.
10
‘Bring Her Back’
The past decade has featured many distinct and defining horror movies, with 2025 being yet another year of innovative brilliance and sublime scares for the genre. One of the year’s best and most compelling forays into the genre comes in the form of Bring Her Back, the second film from Australia’s Philippou Brothers and a haunting, deftly dramatic spin on possession horror.
It follows two step-siblings—troubled teenager Andy (Billy Barratt) and his blind younger sister Piper (Sora Wong)—as they move in with their foster mother and her unsettling young son, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), following their father’s death. While Andy initially dismisses Laura’s (Sally Hawkins) unnerving oddities as being simple eccentricities, he soon begins to unearth a deranged plot surrounding a supernatural ritual and Laura’s dead daughter. Deeply unnerving visual horror blends beautifully with richly explored themes of loss and grief to conjure an emotionally gratifying and frequently frightful horror experience that is sure to be heralded as a landmark achievement of the genre’s current era of greatness for many years to come.
9
‘F1’
Marking one of the most technically innovative sports movies of all time, F1 plunges viewers into the heart-racing intensity of the pinnacle of motorsports with Joseph Kosinski’s trademark talent for engrossing spectacle and the immersive involvement of real figures from the world of Formula 1. Adept at marrying this enormous filmmaking undertaking with a fairy tale story of underdog success, it follows veteran racer and long-retired F1 driver Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) as he is called back to the grid by his former teammate, the owner of a struggling new team in desperate need of results.
It’s formulaic, but rewardingly so. Every beat from Hayes’ egocentric clashes with his hot-headed young teammate, his sense of experience and sporting gamesmanship imbuing the film with an electrifying punch that complements the magnitude of its technical brilliance perfectly. With a box office intake of $631.4 million, F1 stands as one of the year’s defining and most enthralling blockbusters as well as the highest-grossing release from Apple Original Studios.
8
‘It Was Just An Accident’
An absorbing though confronting immersion in the apprehension of revenge and the debilitating effect of doubt, It Was Just an Accident is a true masterpiece of international cinema, a claim consolidated by its litany of international awards, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Iranian film follows a former political prisoner as he abducts the man who tortured him while he was held captive. However, as the man implores that it is a case of mistaken identity, doubt begins to fester in Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), leading him to track those he was imprisoned with to determine his hostage’s identity before exacting his revenge.
While its 104-minute runtime feels sharp by modern standards, the slow-burn nature of the narrative is viscerally agonizing. It all makes for an engulfing psychological thriller underlined by palpable political commentary as it condemns the authoritarianism the oppression of the Iranian regime. Director Jafar Panahi’s courage and conviction earned wide praise from the international film community, but, more pointedly, from more than 150 Iranian artists and activists.
7
‘Weapons’
Another horror flick that took the world by storm, Weapons commanded the screen with its winding story structure and its striking thematic undertones to excel as a viscerally chilling horror that dabbles in supernatural terror while still feeling grounded. The premise alone enthralls, centering on a third-grade class where, at 2:17 am on the same night, 17 of the 18 students all run outside and vanish. A month later, the residents of Maybrook are still reeling from the mystifying tragedy, with six intersecting stories of grief, trauma, and discovery converging to deliver a ceaselessly gripping spectacle.
With its genre-blending bravura, unnerving outbursts of visual horror, and building story of enigmatic suspense, Weapons made an immediate impression as one of the boldest and most universally appealing horror movies this century. Its first hour, particularly, is a masterclass in terrifying mystery and bewildering terror, its air of dread accentuated by brilliantly implemented jump scares and strong performances. Even as the dots start to conjoin and the overwhelming frightfulness of the inexplicable wrath of the mystery runs dry, the film still delivers on rich tension and character-centric drama, culminating in one of the year’s most defining triumphs and a blitzing success for horror cinema at large.
6
‘Superman’
There was always a certain irony that, despite the superhero genre’s unbelievable success throughout the 21st century, the era failed to produce a movie about what is perhaps the greatest superhero icon of all time that landed with fans. 2025 changed that, with James Gunn’s handling of the iconic DC Comics character excelling as a widely adored blockbuster success rich with optimism, humanity, justice, and hope.
Thriving off the back of a note-perfect performance from David Corenswet, Superman delivers a compelling parable about timely, topical issues. It follows Superman as he is attacked by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), a billionaire technological genius who strives to dismantle Superman’s public image and kill him. While it could be more ardent about breaking away from formulaic superhero narrative beats, Superman thrives with its underbelly of positivity, its attitude of grounded value triumphing over the might of political and corporate evil. Only time will tell if it will age as an enduring gem of superhero cinema, but it is impossible to deny that Superman is a powerfully relevant movie for 2025, marked with no small amount of courage and conviction.
5
‘No Other Choice’
An early frontrunner for Best International Film at the Academy Awards—and hopefully a few other categories as well—No Other Choice dazzles as a bleak social satire that skewers notions of desperation and determination in a capitalist society. The South Korean comedy-thriller follows paper industry expert Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as he is laid off after 25 years of service. His hunt for a new job proves to be unrewarding, so when a perfect opportunity presents itself, Man-su resorts to murdering his competitors in order to secure the placement.
Powered by Park Chan-wook’s humane and hilarious direction and Byung-hun’s emphatic lead performance, No Other Choice captivates as a macabre deconstruction of the corporate rat race, a scathing indictment of the competitive nature of capitalism and the lengths it can drive people to. Immediately heralded as being one of Chan-wook’s greatest movies, if not his definitive masterpiece, No Other Choice is brilliantly bold, blissfully bonkers, and bruisingly bleak. It is also one of the best movies of 2025 and is sure to be remembered for a long time as one of the year’s defining highlights.
4
‘The Secret Agent’
Another magnificent marvel of international cinema, The Secret Agent has established itself as a compelling concoction of political tension, thematic richness, and historical drama set amid the final years of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. It follows Armando (Wagner Moura), a teacher evading political prosecution who moves from São Paulo to Recife, hoping to be reunited with his son. However, he quickly learns that the city is not the safe harbor he was expecting, with chaos abounding and prying eyes lurking behind every corner.
Garnering universal acclaim, The Secret Agent is a combination of outstanding acting, razor-sharp direction, commanding visuals, and impressionable stylistic decisions feeding into a phenomenal and thematically loaded story that stands tall among 2025’s finest films. Not a single second of its 158-minute runtime goes to waste as The Secret Agent delivers a thought-provoking, thrilling, and even flourishes of dark humor, which might just prove to be the best picture of the year, or even the decade.
3
‘One Battle After Another’
Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography is littered with impressionable masterpieces, ranging from Western epics like There Will Be Blood to dramatic rom-coms like Punch-Drunk Love. It is, therefore, not a moot point to suggest that One Battle After Another might just be the filmmaker’s greatest movie thus far. Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the darkly comical action thriller unfolds as a perpetually paranoid, pot-smoking ex-revolutionary is forced back into his former ways when an old enemy in the military resurfaces, and his daughter goes missing.
There is an air of screwball whimsy to the movie, one that marries beautifully with its enormous and awe-inspiring action set pieces to conjure one of the most relentlessly entertaining pictures in recent years. Far more than mere mayhem, however, One Battle After Another still invests heavily in its characters, their plights, and their fractured pasts, crafting a nuanced and thematically pointed tapestry of conviction and consequence that compels from start to finish. Sadly, the movie struggled commercially, but it can already be considered among a great many masterpieces that were tragically overlooked upon release, only to be celebrated as classics years later.
2
‘Sinners’
From an unfortunate box office misfire to one of the more stunning surprises of the year, Sinners struck gold, becoming a true pop-culture phenomenon as well as one of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time. A rich and textured blending of historical drama and vampiric chills, it follows twins, WWI veterans, and seasoned mobsters, the Smokestack brothers (Michael B. Jordan), as they return to their hometown in Mississippi with hopes of leaving their troubled lives behind while helping the local Black community. Their plans are uprooted, however, when they are confronted by a terrible evil upon their return.
The outright best collaboration between Jordan and director Ryan Coogler thus far, Sinners is a blistering original blockbuster, a majestic mixture of music-fueled mayhem, vicious and vivacious visuals, and commanding storytelling instincts that stands as one of the most transfixing and triumphant movies of the year. Its status as a defining title of modern horror is already consolidated, with the movie’s blood-soaked brilliance becoming emblematic of the 2025 Summer blockbuster bonanza.
1
‘Frankenstein’
It is almost poetic that in a year that produced so many masterpieces of horror that excelled with their originality and freshness, the film that stands as arguably the best is a masterful retelling of one of the genre’s greatest and most iconic titles. Helmed by Guillermo del Toro, who realizes it with all the Gothic glory it deserves, Frankenstein captivates as a tragedy of abandonment and heartache as much as it does as a grueling and gory tale of scientific ambition and immorality.
Framed as a conversation with a weary sea captain, it covers both Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) life’s work and the tormented existence of the Creature (Jacob Elordi), Victor’s creation, who hunts him. It balances beauty with brutality, humanity with horror, blood-drenched despair with a sense of poignant innocence that is driven by Elordi’s excellent performance and Del Toro’s wonderful eye for character and catharsis.