Another year, another reminder that “best of” lists are less about consensus than they are about the particular bruises, thrills, and aftershocks a movie leaves on you—and 2025 left plenty. This was a year where craft didn’t just serve story, it was the story: images that carried history in their grain, performances that felt like lived-in weather, and filmmakers using genre as a Trojan horse for something personal, political, or quietly devastating. The common thread across this slate wasn’t “importance,” it was urgency—movies that moved like they had something to prove, or something to confess, or something they couldn’t hold in any longer.
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What’s striking is how often these films smuggle the intimate inside the spectacular. Horror became a vessel for communal grief and suburban decay; thrillers turned into moral pressure cookers; comedies drew blood without losing their sense of humor. Even the big swings here—vampires, mysteries, sprawling action set pieces—kept circling back to the same human questions: what do we owe each other, what do we inherit, and what do we do with the damage when it’s already inside the house? Some of these movies left me exhilarated, some left me rattled, and a few left me quietly wrecked in that sneaky way where you don’t realize what hit you until you’re halfway home.
So here it is: our Top 25 Best Films of 2025, counted down in reverse—each pick a different flavor of cinematic compulsion, each one a movie that didn’t just entertain, but lingered. Disagree with the placements, argue about the omissions, fight for your favorite in the comments—that’s half the fun. The only rule is the same one that the best films consistently enforce: if it gets under your skin, it matters.
25. “Jay Kelly”
Playing deceptively like a love letter to cinema only to slowly reveal itself as a eulogy for the life you didn’t live, Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” is a melancholy Truffaut-adjacent lament—“Day for Night” in its cinephile glow and the director’s tender, unsentimental humanism. It’s also a little “8 1/2” in its self-reckoning but without the surreal escape hatch—about regret and the way family and love can slip away while you’re busy being “successful.” Co-written with Emily Mortimer, it uses celebrity as misdirection: George Clooney is terrific as Jay, a self-centered movie star on a European tribute tour who uses the trip to surprise his daughter, only to find she doesn’t want him, the window for fatherhood long closed, leaving him a ghost drifting through the “perfect” life he built. His real “family” is his staff, people he treats like furniture because he always comes first, and Adam Sandler is quietly devastating as the loyal manager who’s become Jay’s closest intimacy precisely because logistics were always easier than love. Shot by Linus Sandgren on 35mm with Nicholas Britell’s score carrying a buoyant ache, it’s one of Baumbach’s most ambitiously visual films, all luminous surfaces that only emphasize the emptiness underneath. Then comes the gutpunch: the tribute montage, Jay in tears watching his life on screen, suddenly remembering everything he missed, everything he left behind, ending on that devastating plea—“Can we go again?”—not as meta nostalgia, but as a desperate request for one more chance to get it right. – Rodrigo Perez [read our review]
24. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
At posting, there is no celebrated performance more this year from critics’ groups than Rose Byrne in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Written and directed by Mary Bronstein, this Sundance Film Festival world premiere follows Linda (Byrne), a working mother with too much on her plate. Her husband is MIA on a long, out-of-town work trip as her apartment begins to fall apart and her young daughter hits a crisis point in a seemingly unsolvable eating disorder. As we remarked in our review, the movie “deftly touches on the societal pressures of motherhood, the inherent misogyny many mothers face, and a healthcare system that is often not properly equipped to deal with either of those issues. That’s only a small aspect of why ‘Kick You’ is a notable achievement, however. Instead, it’s the collaboration between Bornstein, editor Lucian Johnson, cinematographer Christopher Messina, and an often incredible performance from Byrne that transforms what many would read as a domestic melodrama on paper into an often searing, visceral thriller. Not only is Linda stressed, but the audience watching this drama unfold will also be stressed. Bornstein has fashioned a cinematic anxiety-fueled experience, whether you can relate to having children or not.” – Gregory Ellwood [read our review]
23. “Hedda”
A visual and melodramatic spectacle from director and screenwriter Nia DaCosta, “Hedda” takes the narrative behind Henrik Ibsen’s 19th-century play and sets it almost 60 years in the future, in 1950s England. This Hedda is portrayed extravagantly by Tessa Thompson, who, as critic Chase Hutchinson notes, “sees the performer eat up absolutely every morsel of the movie, making everything that much more of a fun time. Right from the opening scene, you can feel the fun that both DaCosta and Thompson are having.” More importantly, our review adds, “The film is ‘something more than just another adaptation of a classic play. It’s darkly funny, more than a little grim, and yet consistently captivating to watch. Even when there are a couple of stretches where Thompson gets pushed to the side, and nobody else can quite bring the same commanding presence she does, she always makes a grand return just when the film needs her to.” In fact, you might not be able to take your eyes off her. – GE [read our review]
22. “Cover-Up”
A man hunched over files, stubbornly pulling at threads influential people begged him to drop—there’s something extinct about that posture now, and that’s what makes Laura Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus’ documentary feel essential. Centered on investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, it’s less a victory lap than an argument for why truth-tellers still matter in an era designed to drown them out. Hersh emerges as prickly, combative, and stubbornly principled, a reporter whose work forced the public to confront horrors like the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal—stories that helped turn opinion against unjust wars and the machinery that sells them. The film plays like a political thriller of method: sources, pressure, paranoia, which is just realism when power is listening, and the lonely ethics of insisting that the public deserves the truth. Just as potent is its side-eye at institutional gatekeeping and prestige-media compromise—the ways major outlets can flinch, stall, or blunt reporting that might upset corporate and political interests, hollowing out the Fourth Estate. That thread feels like another Poitras film waiting in the wings. When Hersh eventually shuffles off this mortal coil, journalism will be worse off for it; “Cover-Up” makes that loss feel immediate, a reminder of what it looks like to speak to power instead of courting it. – RP
21. “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”
Inspired by his own evangelical upbringing, Rian Johnson’s “Wake Up Dead Man” is his most impressive “Knives Out” mystery yet. The thriller follows Jud (Josh O’Connor), a young priest, as he is assigned to a parish in Upstate New York, guided by the charismatic but hateful Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). When a seemingly “impossible crime” murder occurs, our franchise hero, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), arrives, confident he can solve the case and dispel any “miracles” that are inevitably destined to occur. In our review from the Toronto International Film Festival, we noted, “As the film progresses and the circumstances become more dire, Johnson uses Jud as a vessel to confront Blanc on subjects of faith and forgiveness. Truth be told, he almost makes the atheist investigator stop and reconsider the service a priest or a church can provide. Even if it’s just ‘telling stories’ in the context of emotional comfort or introspection. Johnson has subtly or not-so-subtly included timely political themes in all the ‘Knives Out’ films, but these tangents seem somewhat more personal this time around. Jud and Blanc come so close to engaging in genuine philosophical debates that it almost takes you aback. To be fair, these sorts of spiritual topics are not what you’d expect in a ‘Knives Out’ film. Are they a means for Blanc to conduct his investigation? Or is Johnson using this scenario to challenge the viewer’s worldview, whether religious or not? Maybe, in this case, two things can be true, or maybe not.” – GE [read our review]
