What do we do when we start making a movie? We yell “action!” because that’s what this medium is all about. On a basic, primal level, we’re just watching people do stuff. The cooler that stuff is, the more we cheer. So we’ve built whole genres around watching people fight monsters, survive impossible shoot-outs and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Yes, action movies are some of the most exhilarating movies ever made, and they’re a vital organ in the entertainment industry, selling out theaters and holding up tents, allowing other — often more creative and fulfilling — films to get made. We owe a lot to our action movies, whether we love them or not, and we’re here to celebrate the best that 2025 had to offer.
Sorry in advance to “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” a movie with incredible stunts but, you know, there’s also that “story” part that connects the stunts together, and that matters too. Somewhat. Enough to leave it off the list, at any rate.
‘Deathstalker’
At at time when action movies are often extremely expensive, so much so that the fate of a whole studio may rest on their shoulders, it’s comforting to know that not only is it possible to make a great low-budget action movie, but you can also make an extremely inventive one, filled with impressive visual effects and memorable monsters. Steven Kostanski’s “Deathstalker” is a small-scale movie by any studio’s standards, but thanks to the filmmaker’s boundless creativity and hands-on, practical effects skill, it has as many wonderful images and memorable set pieces as most of this year’s major blockbusters. In some cases, more so, because a lot of the blockbusters this year were underwhelming.
“Deathstalker” is a reboot of a cult classic series of sword-and-sorcery movies, all of them sleazy and weird. The revival has tons of gore, lots of memorable monsters and the year’s second-best “stoic tough guy learns the value of friendship” action-fantasy storyline. (The best, as you might imagine, is coming up soon.)
‘Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle’
There are probably people reading this who have never heard of “Demon Slayer,” the anime series or the recent movie, but you should have. It was the sixth highest-grossing movie of 2025, earning more ticket sales than “Superman,” “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” and any of the Marvel superhero movies. That doesn’t necessarily make it great, of course, since there’s no direct correlation between quality and profitability, but “Demon Slayer” actually does happen to be great.
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle” is a continuation of the running fantasy-action series about — just stick with me on this — demon slaying, and the film has zero interest in whether you know the characters and the plot up until this point. If you do, you’ll get more out of it, but even if you don’t, there’s a long history of great pop movies that drop you into the deep end and expect you to catch up as it goes. Heck, just look at “Star Wars.”
All you need to know is that these demon slayers are trapped in an infinity castle — it’s a castle that goes on for infinity, try to keep up — which is full of godlike demons who need to be killed. The vast majority of the film is a series of impossible boss battles, an action film comprised of nothing but the biggest climactic fights you’ve ever seen, with all the extreme dramatic weight that entails. It’s exhausting, but in the best way, and even if this is your first go-around with the series you can probably appreciate just how impossibly epic this story is, how thrilling the fights are and how gorgeous the animation looks.
‘Fight or Flight’
Unceremoniously dumped into theaters at the start of the summer season, James Madigan’s ecstatically fun action-comedy “Fight or Flight” stars Josh Hartnett as a disavowed special agent given one chance to get his life back: Somewhere on this airplane there’s a wanted international terrorist … all he has to do is figure out which passenger it is and bring them home in handcuffs.
There’s just one snag: This terrorist has made a lot of enemies, and Hartnett isn’t the only badass on the plane looking for them. So he’s going to have to fight and kill some people without the innocent civilians knowing about it. But as the film goes on, and the fights get bigger and weirder, we start to wonder if anyone on this plain isn’t a hired killer, leading to a monumentally entertaining climactic action sequence.
It’s silly and it knows it, but it also knows how to deliver gut-wrenching punches and memorably violent gags. What’s more, Josh Hartnett is 100% committed to this bit, and dives into the film in the cannonball position, making a very big splash.
‘From the World of John Wick: Ballerina’
Most people know this movie as just “Ballerina,” because that’s a good name for a movie about a ballerina who is also an assassin. But at some point, the studio seems to have panicked, for fear that audiences might not connect this film to the “John Wick” franchise, so we get an extremely clunky supra-title, and a laughably forced, completely irrelevant, definitely-added-in-post-production cameo from Keanu Reeves.
It’s a damn shame, really, because on its own, “Ballerina” is a blast. The first act is familiar stuff — a little girl watches her father get murdered, she joins one of the assassin schools from the “John Wick” franchise, grows up and gets revenge — but once Ana de Armas starts killing bad guys, the film damn near explodes, with one inventive, over the top, and often surprisingly funny action sequence after another. It absolutely stands on its own. It’s a shame it wasn’t allowed to.
‘Ghost Killer’
Its release went largely unnoticed by American audiences, and professional critics alike, but Kensuke Sonomura’s “Ghost Killer” is a great twist on a classic formula. Akari Takaishi stars as a college student who finds a bullet casing in the street, picks it up and starts seeing a ghost. Specifically, the ghost of a murdered hitman, played by Masanori Mimoto, who wants her to help him get revenge on his killer. When she’s in danger, she can let him take control of her body and fight the bad guys, but she’s still conscious at the time and freaked out by all the violence she dishes out.
So basically, it’s “Ghost” if Patrick Swayze was a hired killer, Tony Goldwyn was an unhinged mafioso and Whoopi Goldberg had to become an expert in martial arts instead of an expert at kissing Demi Moore. That’s one hell of a pitch, and it’s thrillingly realized, with solid drama, a great sense of humor and exciting fight choreography galore.
‘KPop Demon Hunters’
“KPop Demon Hunters” is a lot of things. It’s an animated movie for kids. It’s a musical with an instant classic soundtrack. But one element that’s sometimes overlooked is, it’s also a kick-butt action movie. It’s about three Korean pop stars who moonlight as demon slayers, using the power of their songs to generate magical weapons and send monsters back to their hell dimension. What’s not badass about that?
And to be fair,”KPop Demon Hunters” spends more time with the music than the fights, but those fights are doozies, with high kinetic energy, complex CGI camera movements and a whole heck of a lot of violence. It just happens to be the kind of violence that makes demons explode into puffs of glitter, not pools of blood. As kid-friendly action movies go, they don’t get much better than Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’ worldwide sensation.
‘Novocaine’
Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s “Novocaine” is a wild and creative action-comedy, with a star-making performance by Jack Quaid (who seems to have a lot of those). But the premise is a bit questionable: Quaid stars as a man with a very real medical condition, congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), which means he can’t feel it when his body is hurt, in any way. This is a serious condition with major, life-threatening concerns, but in “Novocaine” it’s played like a superpower, allowing Quaid to take staggering levels of battle damage as he fights a gang of criminals who kidnapped his girlfriend in a bank heist.
The gag, really, is that Jack Quaid is playing a Looney Tune. He takes a licking, keeps on ticking, and never loses his good-natured spirit. He’s so used to patching himself up that when he seriously injures his opponents — often by hurting himself, like punching his hands into broken glass and turning himself into a makeshift Wolverine — he gives them medical advice. He’s a good natured guy in, by design, the wrong genre, and the disconnect is extremely funny because it’s played up like cartoon, and because Jack Quaid is so charming you can’t help but love him.
So on one hand, “Novocaine” is one of the best and funniest action movies of the year. On the other hand it’s pretty messed up that they took a real, serious medical condition and turned it into a skit. Some people might be offended, and fair enough, but if you can get past that — and you are under no obligation to get past that — it’s hard to deny how well-made it is.
‘Predator: Badlands’
Dan Trachtenberg’s “Predator: Badlands” is so damn good it’s been on multiple year-end “Best Of” lists at TheWrap so far, including “The Best Sequels of 2025” and “The Best Movies of 2025.” It is, simply, just that good. Trachtenberg flipped the script on the whole “Predator” franchise and turned the villain into the hero, without sacrificing any credibility.
If anything, “Predator: Badlands” may turn out to be the best in the series. It’s so imaginative — and thanks to a great supporting performance by Elle Fanning, so convincing — that you can’t help but get swept up in its kinda-familiar A-story about (going back to the blurb for “Deathstalker”) a stoic tough guy learning the value of friendship.
‘Sisu: Road to Revenge’
Jalmari Helander’s original “Sisu” is one of the best Nazi-hunting movies around, about a Finnish war hero who runs afoul of history’s most horrible bad guys at the end of World War II, and spends the rest of the film silently obliterating them, while overcoming every hardship they can think to put him through.
“Sisu: Road to Revenge” swaps out the Nazis for the Soviets, and puts our hero Aatami (Jorma Tommila) behind the wheel of a giant truck for half the movie, but it’s a similar tale. The Soviets hate this guy and want him dead, but he’s so determined to stay alive and fight tyranny that he winds up destroying what looks like half a Russian army. They send fighter jets after this guy, and he’s just in a truck, and you have no idea how he’s getting out of this one until “Sisu: Road to Revenge” gives middle finger to physics, and embraces awesomeness for its own sake. Gloriously violent, entertaining mayhem from start to finish, even if the original “Sisu” is still the better film.
‘Superman’
2025 was not a great year for superhero movies. Marvel slipped off its pedestal entirely, with three films that underperformed, even though “Thunderbolts” and “The Fantastic Four” were pretty fun. So all eyes were on James Gunn’s “Superman,” the official reboot of Warner Bros.’ flailing shared universe of costumed crimefighters. If it sucked, it might mean the end of a popular, and highly lucrative era. But it did not suck. In fact, “Superman” totally rules.
David Corenswet makes the title role his own, playing up the “aw, shucks” nice guy angle, which only makes his arch-nemesis Lex Luthor, played by Nicholas Hoult, more homicidal. Superman fights giant monsters, cyborgs, clones and, worst of all, 21st century cynicism to save the day, inspire the masses and give his adorable hellion of a dog, Krypto, some much needed exercise. All this and it’s a great love story too, with Rachel Brosnahan proving to be the best live-action Lois Lane since Teri Hatcher. Heck, maybe ever.
“Superman” was a shot in the arm for mainstream superhero movies, a throwback to the era when good guys were allowed to be good guys, colorful costumes were allowed to pop, and a world where anything could happen was treated like a blank canvas, where anyone could show up, anything could happen and dreams do come true.
