5. “It Was Just an Accident”
The winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Jafar Panahi’s thriller is a masterful allegory for the horrific relationship between the people of Iran and the authoritarian regime that has controlled the nation for decades. When a group of former political prisoners captures the officer who tortured them, a moral quandary over his fate ensues. Panahi’s brilliance lies in how he delicately unfurls all aspects of the scenario as the tension mounts. Throw in one of the best endings for a film this decade, and you’ll immediately appreciate how Panahi continues to craft the most politically relevant cinema of this era. – GE [read our review]
4. “Train Dreams”
A gorgeously melancholy reflection on a bygone era that never feels like museum glass, this is an impressionistic reverie with an actual narrative engine—wistful, soulful, and quietly devastating in its portrayal of a man aging into loss while the world keeps moving without asking permission. Directed by Clint Bentley, written with Greg Kwedar (“Sing Sing”) from Denis Johnson’s novella, it follows Robert Grainier across decades in the early 20th-century American West: a logger and railroad worker trying to build a life, then trying to survive the afterlife of what he’s lost. Joel Edgerton gives Robert a quiet giant presence—stoic but never blank—while Felicity Jones is luminous as the love that becomes memory, and Kerry Condon, Clifton Collins Jr., and William H. Macy arrive like vivid weather systems in a life defined by labor and grief. What knocks you out is the craft: Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is breathtaking (watch out Emmanuel Lubezki!), the natural world filmed with Malick-ian-like awe and bruising intimacy, and Bryce Dessner’s score is heartbreakingly beautiful, music that feels like it’s listening to the Earth. But one of the movie’s quietly boldest threads is moral: Robert witnessing an Asian man pulled off the job and killed over an unproven accusation—workers acting as judge, jury, executioner—while he can only mildly protest, a haunting argument about complicity as a scar you carry forever. It’s exquisite, sad, and quietly furious, a film about ghosts: the ones you loved, the ones you lost, and the ones you didn’t save. – RP [read our review]
3. “Marty Supreme”
It’s New York in the 1950s, but the real period detail is perspiration—sweaty ambition leaking through every pour, every lie, every frantic grin that insists this is all under control when it clearly isn’t. Directed by Josh Safdie and co-written with Ronald Bronstein, the film follows Marty Mauser, a rising table-tennis hustler chasing greatness like it’s oxygen, and Timothée Chalamet plays him as a beautiful, panicked engine: all flash, bravado, and exposed nerve endings, a grifter who wants the dream so badly he turns himself into the pitch. The rush comes from the relentlessness—schemes stacking on schemes, scenes snapping like adrenaline—yet the sting comes from what that relentlessness costs: relationships treated like transactions, intimacy postponed for “after,” a life built on motion because stopping would mean listening to the emptiness. The supporting cast—Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, an odious Kevin O’Leary, a slimy Abel Ferrara, and more—forms a carousel of enablers, marks, and fellow hustle-addicts, each reflecting a different strain of the same American sickness: the belief that wanting something hard enough is the same as deserving it. Shot on 35mm by Darius Khondji with Daniel Lopatin’s score buzzing like a live wire, it’s a non-stop thrill ride that ultimately plays as a triumph—not because the movie pretends the hustle is pure, but because it treats Marty’s willpower like an art form, a ferocious act of self-invention that refuses to apologize for wanting more. – RP [read our review]
2. “Hamnet”
An adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel, “Hamnet” imagines the life of William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), in the English countryside. Miles away from London, where the playwright has a growing following. At the heart of this family are the Shakespeares’ children, one of whom, the title character, will end up inspiring one of the great stage plays ever written. Featuring a generational performance from Buckley, director and co-screenwriter Chloe Zhao has crafted a visceral, emotional cinematic masterpiece. One that lingers with you for hours on end afterward. – GE [read our review]
1. “One Battle After Another”
The past doesn’t knock—it kicks the door off its hinges, then leaves your children standing in the splinters. That’s the bruising truth at the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedic action-thriller, a sprawl about sins we swear we’ve buried, only to realize they’ve been inherited—paid for by the next generation with interest. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a burnout ex-revolutionary trying to raise a child while the old cause and its enemies crawl back into frame, but the movie’s strangest sting is oddly, quietly romantic—Bob and Lockjaw (Sean Penn) both broken by Perfidia’s (Teyana Taylor) rejection, and everyone has to live with the consequences, stumbling through the wake of her choices like it’s fallout you can’t sweep up. Parenthood becomes a form of triage, ideology becomes a hangover, and love becomes the kind of bruise people build their whole lives around. Did we mention it’s also a hilarious thrill ride and idiosyncratic action spectacle about an ex-agitator and bomb expert who can’t remember a secret code to save his life? Then the performances start landing like body blows: Benicio del Toro is a scene-stealing miracle—magnetic, soulful, hilarious—so alive you want to peel him off into an entirely different movie, while Sean Penn is deliciously Kubrick-ianly absurd (and scary) as a deeply insecure psychopath whose menace is rooted in neediness, every grin reading like a plea and a threat at once. Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, and Chase Infiniti deepen the orbit, with Infiniti grounding the moral gravity as the child forced to shoulder what adults broke. Shot by Michael Bauman and scored by Jonny Greenwood, it’s slightly tilted, as if the world can’t stay level under the weight of memory, and even the action has a thesis: a car chase that doesn’t simply get faster, it gets queasier, reinventing the form through vertiginous tension—consequence closing the distance, asphalt turning into anxiety. And when those opening riffs of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” hit, the classic gets rewired into grief—you won’t hear it again without tearing up. Ocean waves, baby, Ocean waves. – RP [read our review]
Honorable Mention:
Other films we considered, Derek Cianfrance’s very underrated “Roofman” featuring an incredibly soulful turn by Channing Tatum, and Kirsten Dunst; Jay Duplass’ hilarious and heartfelt “The Baltimorons,” the nightmarishly funny “Friendship” with Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag,” “Twinless” with Dylan O’Brien, the Sundance drama “Lurker” and the Netflix doc, “The Perfect Neighbor.”
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Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
