THE GIST:

Welcome to my year-end filmography rundown.

This list is an ongoing tribute to my friend who instituted this format. All opinions within are no one’s but my own.

For what qualifies as a 2025 release, I continue to hold: if I, as a member of the public, could reasonably buy a theater ticket in Los Angeles to see it, or if it was widely published to an online platform in the United States, it counts.

I saw a lot I loved. I had a lot of trouble whittling down this list. And there’s still so much out there for me to see. The following consider 131 releases from 2025.

Enjoy!

THE UNHERALDED:

The films that never found their audience, could just use some more exposure, or deserve another look.

The vastness of disconnection told entirely in cramped interiors, off-screen negative space providing the only escape. A deeply felt character study and mediation on the impossibility of the American Dream from the vantage of Lower Manhattan, comfortably in conversation with 2025’s fellow Preparation for the Next Life, Lucky Lu, and Sean Baker’s early output.

In high school, my soccer team and I would daily walk a mile from campus to the only playable field near us, carrying all our school bags and gear with us. An Adidas track bag strap cut into my shoulder as my iPod played through an album sequentially. Autumn air, crispy, with that occasional gust that brought a cold bite. Once there, my mind goes to the taste of blood I got from running sprints and chasing it with light blue Gatorade. It always got dark uncomfortably early.

Some of those guys on the team were my best friends. Some were assholes. A few would tell the lamest jokes during stretches. We killed ourselves at practice and played some great games there, in the middle of nowhere really—at the edge of a residential neighborhood, flanked by quiet Social Security office and decommissioned train tracks. Since then, I heard they tore that field down and put up patio homes. I’ll never get to touch that grass again. What’s the word for that feeling?

A leap forward in the documentary format and an elevated use of machinima. What really shines is the realization that in a world where anything is possible, making anything real is difficult. For fans of logistics, planning, and production details, an extremely commendable staging of the Bard amidst unpredictable ballistic barrages.

I always love a film without a plot but with an agenda. Come ruminate in a familiar-looking place from an unfamiliar perspective. This is a focus afforded to everyday people’s quieter moments after the noisy national headlines have blown away elsewhere. There’s merit in this—just look who hoofed it out to the sticks to hang out and see Josh O’Connor play cowboy: Meghann Fahy! Amy Madigan! Kali Reis!

Twenty years ago, Cattet & Forzani would comfortably sit in the upper echelons of music video director royalty, their eye for pure, cool, unforgettable shots unrivaled. In today’s world though, they’re left to wander the wilderness of indie label cinema, grinding out grindhouse homages grindier than anything Tarantino or Rodriguez could even tease with a fake trailer. This time, their substance is only informed by an averaging of trashy 60s eurospy plot summaries, allowing the genre’s style to lead—a loving roundup of techniques we we’ve lost, and ones we’ve been better off leaving buried.

FAVORITE MOVIEGOING EXPERIENCE OF 2025:

The movie made better with an audience or which somehow scratches the itch only promised by the Nicole Kidman AMC ad.

“War. Pandemics. AI. What the world needs now more than ever is magic.” Right out the gate, a hyperbolic thesis was presented to full laughs from a packed theater. Though never interrogated, further unpacked, or returned to, the Four Horsemen—ranks now bulging in sequelboot bloat—did convince me of this whenever onscreen audiences roared like a rock concert over illusions, misdirections, and plot hole wizardry. The energy was contagious, and our theater joined in.

So, yes. We do need this. Make a hundred more of these. The Now You See Me-verse is my mix-and-match cast heist franchise that still has the juice. This fills seats, busts blocks, and should only ever be experienced in the hallowed ranks of a mall cinema—where talking is encouraged, a thin veneer of popcorn always coats the floor, and gobsmacked audiences of all ages can react in their own unique ways to Rosamund Pike in an Afrikaans accent telling a man to open his mouth, stick out his tongue, and suck on a golf ball-sized diamond. Flawless.

I WAS THERE WHEN IT HAPPENED:

It’s not about the destination, it’s the ride.

I loved the ability to experience a relatively recent BookTok phenomenon, safe from Colleen Hoover dialogue, but still definitely in the company of a wined-up crowd. I heard book readers hated that they stuffed this full of Shakespeare fan-service quotes. That didn’t rankle me. If this is Zhao’s post-Marvel redemption at-bat, those quotes helped deliver a capital-h Hollywood version of this story (the Bard is hot!). She still got to flex her Krzysztof Kieślowski eye, allowing the camera to just sit on the sky or a messy table, giving nature and the everyday deeper spiritual meaning. She got to build her world within this world.

She lulled us in, and then, as I was ready to give myself over to some much-earned tears at the film’s climax, she produced a crib note: the Max Richter needle-drop cheat code, “The Nature of Daylight”. I clammed up. This beautiful story, which had delicately convinced us of art’s ability to reach across time, now shared a bizarre lineage with Stranger Than Fiction. Chloé! We were all rooting for you!

HOT MESS OF THE YEAR:

A product not of inexperience, but negligence. They push the definitional limits of “watchable” and will probably never again be seen by anyone with autotomy over the remote or a modicum of self-respect.

Utterly baffling, its highlights are the unforced errors you’ll point out to your friends from the safety of your couch: an unnecessary recent period-piece setting; a compressed, ticking-clock structure; and a pollyanna attention to the most unimportant, uninteresting B and C plots. People bemoan when male creators can’t write female characters, but this might be the first time I’ve seen one struggle to write male characters. I learned to love Ella, the character, but her fifteen minutes of fame deserved better.

Shults returns to fill life’s most inane moments with claustrophobic anxiety and heartfelt sincerity. Barry Keoghan goes full dirtbag. Jenna Ortega absolutely cooks, playing unhinged with an unpredictable, captivating mania. (Think the two of them ever talked about Sabrina Carpenter on set?) But for most, ostensibly this film’s biggest feature is also its biggest weakness: The Weeknd.

The tissue-thin cautionary pop-star metaphor he portrayed in The Idol doesn’t even begin to come close the asinine heights of self-aggrandizing he scrapes here, literally playing himself, The Weeknd. Watching two people come undone and the different ways they cope—one by pills and booze, the other by obsessing over the meanings behind song lyrics—could make anyone watching on the sidelines uncomfortable, but for an audience to have to sit through The Weeknd having his music fan-splained to him only before exorcising his demons by literally singing his way free?! The moxie.

There were fans of the singer in my screening for this, and even they couldn’t go along for the ride. The phantasmagoric high we experienced wasn’t provided from the film’s bizarre dream sequence, but by the crowd, piece by piece, turning on this film in real time. We came, we saw, we laughed together. It was a true transformative communal experience, one usually reserved for an actual concert.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Because making a ranked list is hard, these shortlist candidates are ordered alphabetically.

Adults are direct, know what they like, suffer bad knees, and have shit to do. All which explains why this 90-minute espionage potboiler squeezes the utmost fun and satisfaction out what is just a lavishly arranged collection of characters undercutting each other’s dialogue across various rooms and hallways. Make “black bag” the new “I love you.”

A modern western with a cast full of thousand-yard stares and clear, crowd-pleasing action. It’s a familiar tale: shiny money threatens to upend a close-knit, last-place town unless a newly deputized sheriff can restore order.

Our old-ways cowboy walks into town on an asphalt horizon, throws playing cards instead of chomping a cigar, and introduces the people to his honorific code of “Plan C”. White hats, black hats (who swig whiskey when they lie), and the requisite Irish immigrant (who tries to keep her head out of the line of fire) exchange nods before high-noon duels commence at lights-out starting lines and DSR stretches. A pure, nonsensical blast, a shaggy dog sports movie for people who don’t know shit about the sport. Yeehaw!

B serving C.

The Safdie Cinema of Anxiety jumps back in time with a post-modern bent, anachronistic needle drops and electric drum beats attempting to pummel its audience into accepting everything its antihero Marty is doing is prescient and totally future-facing.

The thrill of an impossible, surface-scraping, CGI tracking shot of a table tennis ball stands in for the epoch of the orange ball, its introduction providing early viewers with a helpful burst of contrast and changing how they would view the game forever. Casting Abel Ferrara and a drunken Knicks fan from a Sidetalk NYC video reminds us that New York City has always had the propensity for live-wire, chaotic characters who could pop off at the slightest affront. And though inspired by actual 1950s Harlem slang, Tyler, the Creator’s improv neologism of “sun dodger” is so much more lyrical and exciting than literal linguistic fact in describing everyone’s favorite White Boy of the Year. This is misremembered, manufactured history, and that’s what makes it better felt for us.

Made for me. Hefty thematic bookends, Marin Ireland in a non-lethal role, a John Magaro cameo, and Cat Power needle drops. Daniel Pemberton’s score throws a heater as Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal recreate the diner scene from Heat, but Song is smart enough to later mirror the scene with Chris Evans’s rebuttal totally in silence. New York should be more talky and I think rom-coms should also piss people off.

Fanboy service for those who yearn for smoke-filled cafes and fedoras, even if we contemporaneously snicker at the French salon’s mythologizing and philosophical navel-gazing. One of the best-looking period pieces I’ve seen in a long time, from its very much alive production design to its grainy, handheld look. In quieter moments and stolen glances, a touching tribute to the late Jean Seberg. Allez!

A comedic duo for the ages, a color scheme and tone ready for belated Netflix rediscovery and appreciation. In a just world, we’d get one of these every year, “A One of Them Days Joint” chasing each title. Selfishly, I think this deserves all the stars for introducing an iconic addition to the Drew/Dru/Dreux Cinematic Hall of Fame.

A throwback adventure film with a surprising amount of teeth for its PG-13 rating and enough character development to earn a chosen family moral of the story. While audiences are still finding their feet, the world-building unfurls with the unfettered free jazz energy of Scavengers Reign, turning expected CGI slop into creative displays of Chekhov’s gun.

Where Trachtenberg overall succeeds with this story and franchise is his constant upending of whatever loose foundations or expectations exist. The usual antagonist becomes the protagonist. A predator stripped of all its high-tech gear plays defense as prey. And the most human character is a synth. Some guys would rather create the seeds of a subversive franchise spin-off than go to therapy. The best superhero film of the year.

Live-action Looney Tunes (complimentary), a creatively staged chase film that uses its genre trappings in the most economical fashion. I was left in awe at least three times as each action set piece unfolded like an improvised MacGyver-assembled, Rube Goldberg contraption of death, slowly approaching another satisfying kill.

Yes, it’s Magnolia for the Pizzagate generation, but the San Fernando Valley could never host this type of dread-filled riot—this is the best use of the rain-soaked, labyrinthian Georgia suburbs since Prisoners. Now I understand why the kids are all running away!

Any horror film that has the ability to inspire a new TikTok challenge or timeless homemade Halloween costume will always have a place on this list. Meanwhile, I’ve firmly adopted Benedict Wong’s hot dog summoning gesture into my regular theater routine.

GREAT PERFORMANCES:

The actors who defined their films, made bad material great, and occasionally made you crawl the end credits just to see who that was, listed alphabetically.

And a special non-human mention:

TOP 10:

Even the best literary works suffer a terrible batting average at surviving the jump to the big screen. And of those, I rarely show any confidence in film adaptations based on a novella (its liminal form already seems to whisper: the author couldn’t edit down to a short story, nor commit to the rigor of full novel). In sifting through the uneaten crumbs of Stephen King though, Flanagan’s identified a whiplash collection of three acts that he’s formatted here into a wildly entertaining and varied triptych.

As a read, setting down the book in between would allow for a necessary breath of fresh air. But as a single film, unifying these stories with a continuous tone indicates an insanely high degree of difficulty. It’s a huge creative swing that demands recognition and respect, even if admiration may be harder to come by. At least count me in spirit amongst the crowds at TIFF, proudly adding my vote to its Audience Award win tally.

A meta moviemaking text in a finely crafted form. The flip side of The Clouds of Sils Maria, dancing with doubling but charging straight at all the strife with a familial row and hug. Norwegian is the new French.

The highest high-wire act to earn real laughs out of its subject matter. It takes a real keen understanding of time’s relationship between tragedy and comedy to make this not a disaster. Comfortably elongated across the span of a few years, there’s more than enough room for everything to breathe: the laughs, the tears, John Carroll Lynch’s culinary prowess.

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers teased Schaffer’s leveling up from simple parody to loving tribute, but his successful revival of the gold-standard Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker spoof franchise proves his major-league bonafides. This hums like it should: a joke-a-minute rate of fire, a dozen small jabs successfully buttering you up to be KO’d by the most unexpected one-liner. Made me cry twice.

There’s something so satisfying about dropping cloak & dagger genre tropes into a janitorial, lawful-neutral, workaday conceit of Michael Clayton for the gig economy age. This is B-level pulp punching above its class, and what Mackenzie did for dying small town banks in Hell or High Water, he exceeds for platforming and glorifying public infrastructure. The world is amoral, but there’s some solace when mostly invisible and anonymous institutions function like they should.

A black-licorice comedy that plays with western archetypes to shoot culture-war bullet points from belt-holstered phones, pressing all of 2020’s hot buttons like a sugared-up kid gleefully entering an elevator servicing fifty floors. As overstuffed as a nonstop social-media doom scroll, every character here exhibits relatable (because we were there at the time, we have to recognize) moments of ignorance, paranoia, virtue signaling, apathy, and paralysis. The constant cringe and self-reflection is the point.

Ultimately billed as divisive—politically and critically—you enter the viewing experience anticipating which side of the looking glass you’ll find yourself on. Coming out, you’re left with an odd taste in your mouth. Is this a good movie? Is this a bad movie? Maybe we don’t need to be so black and white with your review. “Don’t think about it. Just post it.”

Elevated slapstick that keeps adding plates to spin; domestic screwball that ties and unties its knots with the awkwardness of a Vanilla Sky reference. Warmly shot as to elide its central characters’ stupidity, this looks and sounds like Éric Rohmer yet feels like Step Brothers. And like a true Adam McCay fantasy, here the most anonymous, average-looking guys cast Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona as their love interests. Hilarious.

Finally, an incredibly convincing argument for becoming a vampire: unfettered access to a timeless hive mind, a diverse, polyglot unit more inclusive than contemporary society. While I’d be content to just live longer in the film’s part-hangout, part-party focus, its bravura monster sideshow offers enough of a fresh twist to the horror sub-genre by tapping into a cross-cultural, ancestral wavelength. Sexy, rocking, fun.

The creaky hinge in this piece that rankles most is the short shrift given to Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills. Allotted more than just brief backstory prologue, a hefty third of the film is devoted to her life with Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pat”, to point where we become more interested in her beyond simply as a supporting character.

Oh, how we all would have all loved to see the continuing globetrotting adventures of Ms. Beverly Hills, blowing up pipelines and robbing arms shipments, but her abrupt removal from the rest of this film is the point. Without her drive, we bear witness to the losercore detritus of now-“Bob”, who in sixteen years of raising their daughter, has gained only a new name, but lost almost all his discipline.

This is a former revolutionary recognizing their revolution became moot, a protagonist slowly realizing that they’re not the main character they thought they were. When his past returns, what really transpires is a “meanwhile, back at the ranch” contrast between high-tension ingenuity and a slacking game of catch-up.

While Leo lights up on the couch to watch The Battle of Algiers for the umpteenth time, his daughter has already independently modernized the subterfuge of hidden flip phones and contact aliases—not as a burgeoning radical, but as a self-made, rebellious teenager. Like contrasting notes on a pair of trust devices coming together to make a melody, as one generation of performer firmly enters his grey-haired era, a new generation of star is born.

While numerous filmmakers this year captured imaginations for seemingly pushing the medium forward, under greater scrutiny, these celebrations were usually distilled down to specific physical acts.

We applauded the muscular athleticism of acrobatic, single-take IMAX shots, the dusting off of dormant capture and projection formats, and the technological advancements in high frame rate, stereoscopic 3D performance capture (even as audiences may still be out on its appeal). Sprinkle in some extracurricular filmmaker explainer videos, and even armchair cinema fans became more familiar with the capabilities of their local theater offerings or could cursorily grasp what a “perf” was.

Meanwhile, leaving the bombast promotion and necessity of a blockbuster haul behind, Bi’s contribution to moving the medium forward can afford to be riskier, happily scraping by with all the accolades even with limited public screenings. Though already comfortably holding a box office record for an arthouse release in China, I still believe Bi is yet again iterating on a multi-year plan to fleece Chinese investors out of their money to fund the most high-concept, inscrutable films possible.

Though just as impenetrable and adverse to hand-holding as his previous outings, this time around, Bi is willing to play nice. A series of opening cards ground us in an imaginative sci-fi context, even if they might only exist as a tried-and-true filter to elide censors and cheekily couch criticism of contemporary society. At the very least, it’s an indicator Bi it looking to expand his scope and up the ante on his familiar bag of tricks.

While there is yet another jaw-dropping single take here (whose length could qualify it as its own hourlong drama), it’s telling that it’s not even this film’s most hyperbolic selling proposition. More notable in my mind is an old-school playfulness in both speeding up and slowing down what is captured, coyly rolling out silent-era intertitles, employing M83 across a genre-hopping score, and obsessing over all of our senses. It’s a kitchen-sink, no holds barred approach to titillating his audience that offers something for everyone to hold onto—the closest Bi is likely to get to a crowd-pleaser.

More simply put, this is an incredible, episodic magic show which had me asking, “How did he do that?” every 20 minutes. A grand fable about movie myth-making and shared dreams, this is the only film this year that presented filmmaking not as a stand-in for therapy, but as a dialogue between a creator and his audience.

If this is the last film Bi ever gets to make, it would reside in the first line of his obituary. Let’s just hope he comes back around again. Film is young. He’s shown it has much further to go.

EVERYTHING I SAW IN 2025:

The Shrouds / Universal Language / Grand Theft Hamlet / Den of Thieves 2: Pantera / Presence / One of Them Days / Dog Man / Companion / Bring Them Down / Captain America: Brave New World / The Gorge / Paddington in Peru / The Monkey / Last Breath / Mickey 17 / Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl / Black Bag / The Actor / The Electric State / Ash / Eephus / A Working Man / Warfare / Drop / The Wedding Banquet / Sinners / The Accountant² / Thunderbolts* / Björk: Cornucopia / Havoc / Friendship / Hurry Up Tomorrow / Another Simple Favor / Blue Sun Palace / Final Destination Bloodlines / Novocaine / Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning / Fountain of Youth / The Phoenician Scheme / Love Hurts / Mountainhead / Bring Her Back / Sister Midnight / Ballerina / Karate Kid: Legends / Materialists / 28 Years Later / Elio / The Life of Chuck / Predator: Killer of Killers / KPop Demon Hunters / F1 / Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight / M3GAN 2.0 / Tornado / Sorry, Baby / Superman / Jurassic World Rebirth / The Amateur / The Ballad of Wallis Island / Eddington / Cloud / The Fantastic 4: First Steps / Happy Gilmore 2 / The Bad Guys 2 / Opus / Summer of 69 / The Naked Gun / The Old Guard 2 / Weapons / Highest 2 Lowest / Together / Eenie Meanie / Freaky Tales / Relay / Honey / Don’t! / Caught Stealing / Splitsville / blur: To The End / Preparation for the Next Life / The Roses / Twinless / The Long Walk / A Big Bold Beautiful Journey / Roofman / One Battle After Another / After the Hunt / A House of Dynamite / The Smashing Machine / TRON: Ares / The Mastermind / If I Had Legs I’d Kick You / Good Fortune / It Was Just an Accident / Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere / The Hand That Rocks the Cradle / Nouvelle Vague / Bugonia / Frankenstein / Blue Moon / Sentimental Value / Die My Love / Predator: Badlands / Now You See Me: Now You Don’t / The Running Man / Hedda / Sisu: Road to Revenge / Rental Family / The Ballad of a Small Player / Wicked: For Good / Wake Up Dead Man / Hamnet / Left-Handed Girl / The Secret Agent / No Other Choice / Reflection in a Dead Diamond / Train Dreams / Resurrection / Anemone / Marty Supreme / Megadoc / Nobody 2 / Jay Kelly / The Assessment / Jane Austen Wrecked My Life / The Legend of Ochi / Avatar: Fire and Ash / The Testament of Ann Lee / Dust Bunny / Rebuilding / Sirāt