Best movies of 2025

I don’t do these things just to be difficult. Like in 2024, the shifting nature of my “best movies of the year” inspired me to rank them in tiers, rather than with a definitive ascending list. So here are 15 films I loved in 2025, arranged in alphabetical groups of five. If you saw some and loved them, great; if you’ve never even heard of some of the others, consider this a service to help create your next watch list.

PLACES 11 – 15:

It Was Just an Accident

The Naked Gun 

The Phoenician Scheme

The Plague 

Splitsville

PLACES 6 – 10:

The Mastermind: Kelly Reichardt’s latest patient character study comes wrapped in the trappings of a Vietnam War-era heist thriller about married dad James (Josh O’Connor) planning a theft from a local art museum. Yes, things go wrong with the plan, but the narrative is less about the theft itself than the context of the world in which privileged James doesn’t see his comfortable life as comfortable enough, while other families face far more existential challenges.

One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson delivers what might be his most conventionally thrilling feature film, in addition to finding timely material about what it means to fight the power as Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-member of a revolutionary group, finds his past finally catching up with him and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Anderson paints across an engagingly broad canvas, in a narrative that plays like an epic hero-origin story for Willa discovering the truth behind her family history and a legacy of trying to take down the system.

The Perfect Neighbor: Director Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary about a “Stand Your Ground” incident in Florida’s Marion County, in which Susan Lorincz shot her neighbor Ajike Owens through Lorincz’s front door, unfolds almost entirely through public records: police body-cam footage; interviews with witnesses; and ultimately, police interviews with Lorincz herself. The result is a remarkable portrait of the neighborhood “Karen” as a toxic, almost-certainly-racist presence in a multi-racial neighborhood, and Gandbhir never has to resort to melodrama to convey the potential consequences of laws that allow someone to argue their fear might be more important than someone else’s life.

Peter Hujar’s Day: When you describe it as two actors performing the transcript of a 50-year-old interview, it hardly sounds like stirring cinema—but director Ira Sachs creates a major work out of visualizing the Dec. 19, 1974 conversation between photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), chronicling in detail what Hujar did the previous day. The conversation itself is lively and frequently amusing beyond its name-dropping reminder of a bygone era of New York intelligentsia, with Sachs’ visuals and use of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor providing an epic, Ulysses-like feel to the idea of one day in any human life.

Sinners: Ryan Coogler’s 1930s-set mix of horror, musical and socially-conscious drama—about twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) returning from Chicago to their Mississippi hometown to open a backwoods juke joint—keeps firing off risky ideas, ranging from whether Black Americans have any chance to win at capitalism, to the consequences of “passing” as White, all while delivering something wildly entertaining. And if I read it correctly, it seems to incorporate one of the most audacious perspectives on Christianity and colonialism that I’ve ever seen a mainstream film attempt.

PLACES 1 – 5:

Eephus: You don’t have to be in a place of contemplating your own mortality for co-writer/director Carson Lund’s hangout comedy—spending one day with community-league baseball teams playing their last game on a field that’s about to become a construction site—but it helps. While there’s plenty of shaggy charm to the dialogue and its friendly-slash-poking dude-banter, there’s also a melancholy edge to guys realizing that twilight is falling on their time in the sun, while the game they all love becomes something the next generation doesn’t care about at all.

Marty Supreme: Josh Safdie loves stories about on-the-make guys convinced that they’re smarter and more destined for victory than the rest of the world sees in them—and that’s certainly true of Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a Jewish youth in early 1950s New York convinced his skills as a table-tennis ace will lead him to the big time—if only he can get out of his own arrogant way. Chalamet’s performance might be his best ever, anchoring a blood-pressure-raising episodic narrative that builds to a weirdly emotional climax in which a Safdie hero finally has a different perspective on what it means to “win,” even if he probably still hasn’t.

The Things You Kill: Writer/director Alireza Khatami follows a Turkish academic named Ali (Ekin Koç) who begins to suspect that his father might have been responsible for the “accidental” death of his mother. Meanwhile, Ali befriends Reza, a new worker on Ali’s small farm, and it’s no coincidence that those two names together make up the filmmaker’s name, as he explores reconciling dueling parts of your psyche. But Khatami’s tense film ties that into cultural ideas of manhood, their accumulated impact over generations, and how terrifying it can be to wonder if you’ll become like your parent.

Wake Up Dead Man: Rian Johnson’s Benoit Blanc stories are always less about intellectual puzzles than they are moral ones; this richest example yet finds Blanc (Daniel Craig) consulting on a murder case at an upstate New York Catholic parish. Though it’s far from dour, there’s less of Johnson’s puckish humor in a meditation on American religiosity in the 21st century that’s both angry and heartbroken, with Josh O’Connor’s wonderful performance serving as the fulcrum. There’s a depth of feeling here beyond partisanship, finding entertainment and enlightenment in seeking the true heart of Christianity.

Zodiac Killer Project: Charlie Shackleton’s video essay begins from a failed attempt to secure movie rights to former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty’s memoir about his decades-long personal investigation into the identity of California’s notorious Zodiac serial killer. Without those rights, Shackleton ends up describing in detail the film he would have made, and in so doing crafts an amazing deconstruction of conventions and clichés within the ubiquitous “true-crime documentary” genre that also acknowledges why those predictable components can still be so appealing, delivered in a package that is itself a one-of-a-kind creation.