Movies still speak to us. And in 2025, they had a lot to say about faith.
Certainly, the year saw its share of faith-based flicks hit theaters, and many of them made a powerful impact at the box office. Two films by Angel studios landed in the box office’s top 50 in 2025: The King of Kings (No. 34 with $60.3 million) and David (No. 48 with $41.8 million as of Dec. 26, but it’s still adding to its gross). The Chosen television show pushed Season 5 to theaters this spring, drawing Christians to the multiplex by the millions. We reviewed perhaps a score of Christian films over at Plugged In, ranging from kid-friendly animated flicks (Light of the World) to real-world dramas (Between Borders) to genre-straddling dramedies (The Unbreakable Boy).
But the secular world had spirituality on its mind this year, too. Tons of top-shelf films deal with the biggest of big issues: good and evil. Faith and doubt. God and man. Sin and salvation.
When I put together Watching God’s traditional “best of” list for a given year, I like to take a look at what these secular films had to say about faith. And I take those messages and balance them with other criteria: Were they good messages? Was it a good film? How much did it resonate with me personally?
That often leads to a pretty eclectic list, and this year is no exception.
The pic leading the Oscar pack managed just a 10th-place finish here. Paul Thomas Anderson movies can be hard sells for a sentimentalist like me. One Battle After Another is thought to be one of Anderson’s warmest, most approachable flicks, and it does have its charms. Leonardo DiCaprio may be at his funniest here. But the content concerns are extreme, and—outside the resonant story of a father trying to rescue his daughter—the messages here are pretty muddy.
But Anderson does explore faith and religion extensively, setting up a false belief system (the villainous and racist “Christmas Adventurers Club”, which Anderson may be using to wag an accusatory finger at Christian-tinged nationalism) against a radical, do-gooding form of faith embraced by the wise martial arts instructor Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro). As St. Carlos does his best to protect and hide undocumented immigrants (in, fittingly, a church), members of the Adventurers Club greet each other with the very creepy salutations of “Hail St. Nick.” Oh, and for extra credit, we also visit an abbey populated by marijuana-growing nuns. Yes, One Battle After Another had a lot to say about religion and faith—though what it said landed more in the realm of caricature than any real exploration.
9. The Testament of Ann Lee
Want proof that movies were preoccupied with faith this year? All we need do is point to The Testament of Ann Lee, a musical biopic of one of history’s most colorful, and least known, religious figures. In the 18th Century, Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) founded a movement that became known as the Shakers—so dubbed because of their boisterous, charismatic style of worship. She and her followers emigrated from England to the New World just before the American Revolution, and they set up a religious commune in upstate New York, where they lived, evangelized and ultimately made some pretty nice furniture. Oh, and Ann Lee’s followers thought of her as the second coming of Christ.
A quirky, near-forgotten religious sect seems like an unlikely subject for Hollywood. But The Testament Ann Lee is fascinated by the Shaker movement’s exotic underpinnings and egalitarian stances. And even though the Shakers were famously celibate, the film takes that as an excuse to deal with Ann Lee’s own sexual experiences (so be warned). In addition, most Christians would categorize Ann Lee’s Shakers as a cult, not a Christian denomination. But the movie also features some beautiful traditional Shaker hymns, and it reminds us that belief can be a source of power and change.
Note: While this movie was released to a select few theaters in 2025—presumably to set the table for an Oscar run—you’ll not be able to see this film yourself until likely mid-January.
The story of Frankenstein, as created by Mary Shelley in 1818, comes with some potent spiritual themes. In her original story, the real monster isn’t so much Frankenstein’s monster as it is Victor Frankenstein himself—driven by science-borne hubris to play God. Guillermo del Toro embraces that message for his own iteration of Frankenstein. But in so doing, he takes it a step too far himself—turning Frankenstein’s creation into a godlike innocent.
Del Toro has always loved his monsters. And even though the director says that he’s a very skeptical agnostic, his films almost always come with some interesting Christian elements—sometimes resonant, sometimes antagonistic. It feels like Frankenstein does a bit of both.
Director Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is certainly one of the year’s greatest aesthetic cinematic achievements—a creative, thoughtful horror flick that tackles a number of weighty topics. But Sinners spends its greatest energy in the realm of faith. And the results are decidedly mixed.
While we do see some positive references to Christianity. But for the most part, the religion plays almost a secondary foil here (just behind the movie’s terrifying vampires). Coogler suggests (and, historically, with reason) that Christianity was forced upon America’s Black enslaved inhabitants and still serves as a restrictive, not liberating, force. But the film also explores the amalgamation of both culture and faith—pointing to the fact that, throughout history, we often mesh and blend elements from a whole host of sources. Music—the real agent of change here—is Sinners’ prime example. But in our main characters’ beliefs, we see that same melding process in religion, too.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t been the same since Avengers: Endgame. But for me, the MCU pushed two surprisingly strong films into theaters this year—films that, taken on their own, feel like a return to what the MCU always did best. The Fantastic Four: First Steps featured some outstanding storytelling. And while the film wasn’t explicitly religious, you didn’t need to squint very hard to see some powerful spiritual elements in play.
You can read about those religious underpinnings in a previous article. But in short, you’ve got a dark god (Galactus) and his herald (Silver Surfer Shalla-Bal) who want to claim the son of Sue Storm and Richard Reed. The story is filled with biblical echoes and spiritual ruminations, along with moments of self-sacrifice and redemption. Oh, and the movie’s quite a bit of fun, too.
A priest is murdered during the Good Friday Mass. Another priest is the prime suspect. Director Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out mystery is saturated with religious themes and imagery from beginning to end—including what appears like a miraculous resurrection.
Like One Battle After Another, Wake Up Dead Man appears to give us two contrasting pictures of belief. On one hand, you’ve got the combative Christianity embraced by the movie’s victim, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin)—a false prophet who leads his own sheep astray (the film suggests) and who truly worships only himself. On the other, you have the faith embraced by Father Jud (Josh O’Connor)—a man who believes Jesus came to love the world’s sinners, not fight them. It’s a nice message, ultimately, though the dichotomy drawn by Johnson is a little misleading. And the fact that the movie’s charismatic detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is almost militantly atheistic will sour the movie for some. But rarely will you see themes of faith so effectively and so sincerely tackled within the context of a whodunit.
Also worth noting: Rian Johnson was raised Christian. And while he’s not a believer now, the director says that he wanted to deal with faith honestly and respectfully in Wake Up Dead Man. Take a look at my interview with Johnson here:
No one in this Norwegian-language film is particularly religious: Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), a famous film director, expresses distain for church, and his two estranged daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Ibsdotter Lilleaas), appear to have followed their father in at least this one respect. So it’s interesting that, In Gustav’s latest screenplay, the most critical scene features an atheist confessing to an act of prayer.
Perhaps that’s fitting. While it never says so, Sentimental Value is about sin and brokenness, reconciliation and redemption. It’s about a father who wants to reforge a connection with his eldest daughter—a daughter who, turns out, needs that connection as well. Sentimental Value can feel bleak and stark at times. And that makes its messages of love and family all the more powerful.
While The Fantastic Four: First Steps made more money at the box office, I think that Marvel’s Thunderbolts* was the superior movie. Maybe that’s partly because the film deals so powerfully with the subject of depression. But I also think this ragtag group of shamed heroes and B-class villains reminds us that we all fail—and we all have the ability to be better than we’ve been.
I haven’t written about this movie for Patheos, but I did unpack some of the movie’s more resonant messages in a Plugged In a blog, “Three Surprisingly Christian Themes Found in Thunderbolts”. And one of the biggest? The Thunderbolts’ biggest foe turns out to be the person they need to save, not beat. Even in the improbable, high-flying MCU, the greatest weapon of all is just what the Bible says: love.
For a few more thoughts on Thunderbolts*, check out the Plugged In video below.
The last two movies on this list are not particularly religious. But both dabble in the spiritual and ask, essentially, the same question: What does it mean to live a life of meaning? In The Life of Chuck—a story that’s told backward–the answer is surprisingly simple. To live a life worth living, you gotta dance.
Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) is a husband, father, accountant … and dancer. And in the film’s glorious second act, he dances.
The Life of Chuck is a hard film to encapsulate. It begins with the end of a world, where the doomed find their only hope and solace in connection. It ends with a beginning—with a young Chuck’s understanding that, whatever the future brings, he’ll face it with life and light and exuberance. In my Watching God blog, I call The Life of Chuck a “humanistic fable,” but people of faith can pull plenty out of this film, too. And of all the films that I’ve written about on this list, this is the one I can’t wait to see again.
Ironically, we don’t see many trains in Train Dreams. But they are a symbol of what really moves this movie: change. Inexorable, unstoppable, change. The story introduces us to Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton), a man who lived most of his life in the backwoods of Idaho. He knew just a handful of people during all his 80-plus years. If we gauge his impact on the world around him, it’d be barely a ripple from a rock tossed in a pond. But through his eyes, we see a story—a fable—curiously universal.
The religious and spiritual content in Train Dreams is significant. We see ghosts and premonitions. Characters ruminate on God, His creation and His oh-so-perplexing ways. But the film doesn’t offer us pat answers or dispiriting rejections. Rather, it embraces the mystery of it all, the dark glass of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13:12. Train Dreams is a slow, deliberate film, and not one to everyone’s taste. But as it moves forward, with all the purpose and power of a slow-churning locomotive, it inspires wonder. And it encourages us to wonder, too.