Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
by Walter Chaw We will never stop gathering to hear stories, because stories are how we’ve survived as a species. Stories are where we’re the strongest, and where we’re the most vulnerable. We make cults of stories, we attach religion and ritual to them. We sit with them in the dark with others of our people. We are evolved to pull nourishment from them like sucklings to the cathode teat–like lampreys on a silver shark suspended between red, cavern-height curtains, flickering there in perpetual, antic motion. There’s nothing wrong with the movies. There’s something wrong with audiences that are conditioned to dismiss the central importance of stories in their lives, taught to treat them with disrespect–especially the stories made for children or in genres relegated to a lower class. That’s not how it started. All stories used to be horror stories. All stories were for children. There’s nothing wrong with the movies. The movies are fucking amazing. The movies are always fucking amazing. They’re one of the last things you can count on anymore.
2025 was a nightmare. The rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem was paid for by us, by our taxes and our votes, and our media desensitized us to all the levelling. Remember when you were a kid watching a movie and couldn’t stand the thought of a single injustice? Did you smother that voice in its cradle? Is it dead, or is it still trying to assert itself through you, only you won’t let it out anymore? You’re going to need it for what’s coming. Time to wake it up.
The films of 2025, like the films of any year, are bound together thematically. Or maybe they have nothing to do with one another, but it’s human nature to link them thematically. Same difference. There is no such thing as objectivity. If you seek it out, you’re fully as stupid as a bag of hammers. Everything is subjective. You’re here to fumble for order, for gestalt where there is none. You’re here for this list to see things through my filters and biases, or you’re here to affirm your own at my expense. Same difference.
The ground rules are the usual: no documentaries (subject gets too mixed up with execution for me), and I avoid including films by creators I consider friends, even if thinking of them as such makes me deluded. Too messy. I can’t begin to unpack the biases I know about, much less the ones I’m incapable of decoding through the miasma of my neediness and all the pinprick traumas in the mosquito net of my upbringing. I can be happy for these friends, though. A few this year made films that I believe are their best, and I’m proud of them. Many would appear in my Top Ten if I gave in. I am never happier than when the people I love thrive. I have wasted so much of my life looking for validation and confirmation of success through other people’s terms. The deadly sin of needing praise. How my life improved when I chose to elevate my friends instead. We’re going to need each other to survive what’s coming. Hell is other people. But Heaven is other people, too.
“At a time when people tell you art is not important, that is always the prelude to fascism.”
Guillermo del toro
Here’s the list of films I disqualified despite writing at length about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. I will do that sometimes, i.e., review something a buddy made–primarily when I’m worried their work will be misunderstood in some way. Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, for example. I get defensive, though I try to be transparent about it. I will say that Wake Up Dead Man is my new favourite of Rian’s films. It’s personal and extraordinarily vulnerable. And Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2 is that for Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill: a genuinely beautiful memory piece that isn’t mired in nostalgia, but rather wields nostalgia in a sometimes brutally intimate way. I love Leigh Whannell’s heavy treatise on grief-as-body-horror Wolf Man, Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger, and the Adams Family’s (again, career-best) Mother of Flies. Think of this sub-list as an aperitif–these are appetizers that in some cases exceed the main course. But I’m biased, my friends made them: Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Wake Up Dead Man, Black Phone 2, The Toxic Avenger, Adulthood, The Running Man, Mother of Flies, She Rides Shotgun, Frewaka
50. Tornado 49. Twinless 48. It Ends 47. Him 46. Sinners
Fujin is a samurai living masterless with his daughter Tornado in the Scottish Highlands of the 18th Century, travelling with a circus as a puppeteer and trying to keep his kid incurious and close by. When Bandits appear, led by a psychopath and his son, Tornado is left to find her way alone in a strange place. 2025 is marked by films about daughters and fathers–movies primed, I confess, to flay me, starting with John Maclean’s stylish, violent, detailed Tornado. The future is a young woman. Men have killed the world.
Then there’s Twinless, one of several sharply observed comedies appearing in the middle of a period where I’m having a hard time finding anything funny anymore in a genuine, non-mordant way. Which is not to say there isn’t an astringent undercurrent to Twinless that anchors it to the complex realities of relationships and grief. Similarly, the high-concept science-fiction premise of It Ends is moored to unanswerable questions about what to do when the unimaginable happens. In It Ends, a group of college friends goes on a road trip to help one of them make a life change, but their journey through a forest has no exit. The good news is that the car no longer seems to need gas; the bad news is that every time they stop to see what there is to see, hordes of terrible things come running at them from the wilderness. The road does end, though–it’s right there in the title. That’s when the hard part starts.
I skipped Him when it came out last fall because it was pilloried critically and popularly. (In truth, I was also lazy and it looked like something I could skip.) Cam is a blue-chip QB prospect, and Isaiah White is the star QB of the NFL’s Saviors franchise whose imminent retirement potentially makes way for a PTP’er like Cam. The Saviors invite Cam to spend a week with Isaiah at his training/living compound to see if he has what it takes to succeed in the world of professional American football. If you’re a fan of the sport, like I am and have been for life, you know the equivocations and deadening it takes to be able to continue to watch a product seemingly designed to force men from disadvantaged backgrounds to engage in gladiatorial contests that further enrich a cabal of weird, white, billionaire owners. If the claustrophobic, nihilistic Him doesn’t quite nail the ending, it at least offers one of the more cathartic resolutions of a year that needed all the release it could get.
Japanese slow-burn horror master Kiyoshi Kurosawa keeps a recent winning streak going with Cloud, a barbed gig-economy, Internet-reseller drama in which a young man scams enough customers to cause them to organize an ambush and attempt a lynching. A sly companion piece to Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, it further indicates a specific shift in Asia’s relationship with capitalism that I find galvanizing. (South Korea’s more than Japan’s, in truth.) They treat it like an alien invasion, a parasite that takes over people en masse and begins to warp reality as a consequence, and I think that’s very wise. One of the reasons Bugonia doesn’t work–doesn’t improve on the South Korean original, anyway–is that it lacks the comprehensive dark of a truly suffocating worldview. American conspiracy cults just don’t cut it as an analogue.
Dan Trachtenberg had himself a year with two more contributions to the Predator franchise that handily achieve what Star Wars has struggled to accomplish: fresh stories, cultural relevance (some great mother/son stuff in the animated Predator: Killer of Killers to go with Predator: Badlands‘ father/son drama), and kick-ass action sequences. Watch it with Albert Birney’s trippy OBEX, the story of a man and his dog that plays out as if “Max Headroom” had metastasized into Dreamscape (in a year that saw the no-one-wanted-this completion of the Tron series, no less): an 8-bit nightmare that replicates the sensation of being addicted to an Atari 2600 at the age of 10 and imagining the power of ten-pixel swords on the walk to the bus stop. OBEX slides in comfortably next to modern post-mod/Internet-greenhouse flowers like I Saw the TV Glow and Skinamarink. This is what tomorrow looks like: yesterday’s monsters, marinating in the cultural sewage of two generations and grown monstrous and strange. I got a sudden intuition while watching them that our current crop of tech bros was spawned beneath grow-lights and artificial methane fertilizer. These are our heroes? No wonder we’re fucked.
Sharp Corner features one of 2025’s two loathsome Ben Foster performances (the other belonging to the Star 80 + Hoosiers sports/domestic violence biopic, Christy) as an unassuming milquetoast of a suburban dad–father issues again–driven mad by an abrupt road curve in front of his house that periodically causes drivers to lose control of their vehicle. Song Sung Blue has something like this as well, and I wonder if this doesn’t represent a collective anxiety about life being so violently unpredictable right now. The overriding question of the film becomes, “How is it that any of us can be okay in a world this capricious?” Consider also Josh Safdie’s feature-length panic-attack Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet as self-proclaimed Best Ping-Pong Player in the World Marty Mauser, a malignant narcissist who hustles everyone he knows for a few bucks to fly to Japan and insinuate himself into a tournament to which he was not invited, but is sure he’s destined to dominate. Gwyneth Paltrow as a reluctant patron and Abel Ferrara as the world’s angriest, and toughest, grieving dog owner are standouts among the sluggers’ row of supporting players spicing up Safdie’s period New York with antic, irrepressible, jumpy energy. If it’s finally just Uncut Gems‘ little brother, well, so be it. Most interesting to me, beyond the picture’s obvious craft, is how Marty is a shoe salesman, just like a poor, under-employed paper exec about to meet his maker on a secluded highway in No Other Choice. Once is nothing, twice is a trend, and the end goal of Capitalism is to free man from middle-management so that he can join the subsistence proletariat.
40. Where to Land 39. Eight Postcards from Utopia 38. Companion 37. The Monkey 36. The Ice Tower
I love Hal Hartley’s smart, dialogue-dense status reports from various milestones in his life. His Where to Land finds a film director on the downhill side, cleaning up his estate and looking for work as a cemetery custodian’s unpaid assistant in order to get closer to a real, tangible eternity rather than the ivory-tower take on the same. Like this year’s Sentimental Value, it finds another wildly successful director doing his best to communicate with his estranged daughters through the only medium in which he’s eloquent. Hartley’s version is typical Hartley: Spartan in its approach, but not off-putting in any way; rarefied but warm and welcoming; beautifully written, if still artificial in what is better known these days as the Wes Anderson style. It’s a beautiful bookend to his early-career masterpiece, Trust. Those in the know, know.
Romanian provocateur Radu Jude continues to make his case as this generation’s Luis Buñuel with Eight Postcards from Utopia, a mad, feature-length montage of clips carved from analog recordings of television commercials and live broadcasts–the most endangered of our popular media, archived so infrequently and inconsistently that even stuff from before a mere 15 years ago is lost for good. Jude groups his scrapbooks into eight separate categories, juxtaposing images rescued from the brink to tell a fascinating history of who we are based on what a media of instant gratification and parasitic ingratiation looked like before electronic cookies began sorting us into easily manipulatable Ids. It’s like an adaptation of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, and Jude continues to be one of the most interesting and inspired filmmakers of the new millennium.
What we’re seeing reach a peak in 2025 is this steady blurring of the lines between entertainment and reality. If the Terrifier films have any lasting cultural cachet, it will be as a relatively stark exhibit in the case for our species’ suicide through amusement, wherein “Art” the clown questions if we are not entertained by the terminal weight of our loss of empathy. Lucile Hadžihalilović’s slow-cinema meta-fiction The Ice Tower marries mythology with film as the twilight confuses things during a lonesome woman’s midnight explorations. If anything, it reminds me of Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus: the same supernatural tint to its witching-hour metropolitan streets and empty, windswept landscapes; the same feeling of connections nearly made with people recently lost, not to mention all the contortions we go through to make a story with meaning out of the eldritch horror of chaos. The Ice Tower interrogates cinema as a reliquary or ritual revisitation–celluloid fort/da for the grief-stricken and the lovelorn.
35. Peter Hujar's Day 34. Toxic 33. The Ballad of Wallis Island 32. Lurker 31. The Damned
The distaff version of this year’s The Plague, Lithuanian filmmaker Saule Bliuvaite’s lacerating Toxic details the vicious vivarium of a back-alley modelling agency promising young women a career in high fashion, leading one aspirant to buy tapeworm eggs on the black market to aid in her goal of achieving a sub-zero dress size. Fascinatingly, this is the first of two 2025 films to feature this strategy for weight loss, and I do wonder if our culture of miracle shrinking drugs isn’t already having a curious effect on the collective unconscious. Newcomer Vesta Matulyte has a Kate Moss quality about her, all angles and joints; Bliuvaite captures her at the most awkward moment of her adolescence, teetering between true childhood and the kind of beauty that makes her a target of predators (and an object of hatred for peers). In a series of abandoned, industrial landscapes, our heroes walk and talk, dream and bargain, more aware than they would appear of the danger they’re in at all times. Toxic is a fable of impoverished young women struggling to improve their station in a hostile environment. It’s a gut-punch.
So is James Griffiths’s The Ballad of Wallis Island, which seems pleasantly life-affirming on the surface but lingers for days on the strength of its melancholy undertow. Here, a legendary folk duo is hired by an eccentric fan to perform a private concert on his personal island years after their acrimonious dissolution. Old resentments and old flames bubble to the surface, and what’s left at the end is a quiet, mature treatise on moving on, not moving on, and the trap of nostalgia. Alex Russell’s Lurker is another type of music-industry fable in which creep Matthew, after forming a parasocial relationship with flavour-of-the-month rocker Oliver, worms his way into the star’s inner circle, planting himself stubborn and immovable like a barnacle. A film where no one is good and everyone wants to be famous, it’s another of 2025’s hard looks at a society without values, without history, and ultimately without a future.
I was ruined by Thordur Palsson’s wintry The Damned, in which a young widow in a remote Nordic fishing village is forced to make the impossible decision to leave a shipwreck’s survivors to their deaths because of circumstance and resources. There’s a scene in Aguirre, The Wrath of God where our heroes wake to find part of their crew trapped in a whirlpool in a wide bend of the river: within sight but outside of help. All of this film feels like that, as the villagers use superstition, religion, and mythology to explain their way through these hardships, while the cruelties of a difficult death are read as portents of an angry god. Decisions made in good faith do nothing to alleviate the atrocities our gods are capable of. In fact, they define the nature of the gods we create as confessions of the cruelties of which we are capable. What is the price of survival, and does it always outweigh the sweet relief of death? What prize is survival if we sacrifice our empathy along the way?
30. Friendship 29. Misericordia 28. The Ugly Stepsister 27. Reflection in a Dead Diamond 26. Sirāt
Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship pairs well with this year’s Twinless and Splitsville: awkward comedies of manners that reflect changing norms in the age of pandemic isolation, cultural balkanization, and the last gasps of traditional nuclear expectations. It’s about a lot of things–male vanity chief among them–including what heroism and, yes, friendship look like. Like all great comedies, it’s a high-wire act, too. No less so Alain Guiraudie’s sly Misericordia, about a hapless, bedraggled prodigal’s return to a small village where the secret desires and petty paranoias of a few locals prove no match for him. Neither a comedy nor a thriller like Guiraudie’s lauded Stranger by the Lake, Misericordia is instead a satire of hypocrisy and how, in matters of polite society, religion, and the larded gentry, the one thing truly unconscionable is queerness.
Emilie Blichfeldt’s lavishly, disgustingly tactile The Ugly Stepsister offers another takedown of the peculiarities of the ruling class with a period retelling of the Cinderella story. The eponymous Elvira is put through a series of excruciating beautifying mutilations to help her compete with all the comely lasses of the upper crust competing for the attentions of a vapid prince. She eats tapeworm eggs, has her nose destroyed and remolded, learns to dance and enunciate, and suffers various amputations to squeeze her conventionally “unfortunate” anatomy into tiny shoes better suited for a doll. Leaving little to the imagination, it’s vicious and hilarious in its unwillingness to flinch. Couching itself in the trappings of a prestige costume drama makes The Ugly Stepsister at once funnier for its uncanniness and a satire that takes on the kinds of exploitation “high” art engages in, which can be just as damaging as any “low” examples of the bikini sex genre. Maybe more so.
Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet subvert another genre, the 1960s spy extravaganza, with Reflection in a Dead Diamond. Opening as a Thomas Mann reverie and ending as an intoxicating Mario Bava fandango, it’s more a deep vibe than a meticulously plotted clockwork. It’s also possibly the most visually beautiful of this year’s selections, a sensory overflow that relies on one’s knowledge of cinema in general and the spy genre, in particular, to fill in any blanks between vignettes. It allies itself in this sense with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ode to cinephilia The Secret Agent–the two providing as strong an argument as I can remember for the durability of film as our single most important form of communication and connection. It caused me to wonder if there were any experiences in my life I had not conflated, somehow, with film–if I even had the language to describe a thing that’s happened to me without using something I experienced through the movies as intermediary, clarifier, and metaphor. It’s a reflection, certainly, and more, since the picture engages every sense in turn–so that by the end, of all the things it resembles, it’s Proust that comes to mind.
The extended prologue of Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt sees shirtless roadies toiling in the desert sun to set up a wall of speakers for a remote rave in the vein of Burning Man. With the hum of the amps heating up the subwoofers, Laxe foregrounds the technology against a backdrop of sheer cliff walls–a tableau wondrous for how the two mirror each other and foreboding for how oddly claustrophobic it all feels despite the wide-open skies and endless desert. The sound is a smothering blanket, the speaker arrangement designed for it to redouble itself, breaking over its audience like a relentless tide. I felt it heavy in my chest, an apt warning that the story that follows–of a father looking for his daughter, who has disappeared during one of these unnamed nomadic dance parties–will be grave and doomed. The movie this most feels like is George Sluizer’s Spoorloos, or perhaps Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. Sometimes, see, terrible shit happens. Just try to stop it. Sirāt is set at the end of the world. We all know it’s coming, if it’s not here already. None of us can do a fucking thing about it.
Charlie Polinger’s The Plague takes the unusual tactic of telling a bullying tale from the perspective of not the bullied, but a kid in the middle of the pack who occasionally catches some of the spillover, the collateral damage. Our protagonist is the new kid in pee-wee water-polo camp, gangly, awkward Ben, and we get the sense he’d be the target of the little animals in his group if not for the conspicuously “weird” Eli functioning as unwitting human shield. Though the obvious move here is a My Bodyguard scenario in which the misfits form a familial bond, the film more accurately captures my experience of outcasts just sort of surviving, destined to never speak again once they part ways. Coach/guardian Wags (Joel Edgerton) is well out of his depth, entirely incapable of managing the boys and their constant cruelties, leading to one horrible night where the illusion of order breaks down and Ben, in a kind of interpretive, non-supernatural representation of the explosive catharsis at the end of Carrie, finally dances like no one is watching.
20. Die My Love 19. The Mastermind 18. Blue Moon 17. Warfare 16. Father Mother Sister Brother
Kelly Reichardt’s characters are listless yet driven towards obscure goals. The Mastermind, her latest, casts Josh O’Connor as an art thief planning a heist in the way that most of us spend our lives knocking around looking for purpose until all the lack of direction coalesces into a career. He’s a Grady Tripp, the college professor played by Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys, who scored big on his first novel and has coasted ever since. One of Grady’s students reads the follow-up novel he’s been working on for decades and tells him that, while it’s beautiful, it’s as if he’d abdicated the responsibility to make decisions. Mooney doesn’t make decisions. He makes plans, sure, but decisions? The world is falling down around the 1970 of The Mastermind (Vietnam, Watergate looming); why make plans when there’s no real future to speak of? Mooney’s heist falls apart. He is betrayed by people he trusts and betrays them in turn, because he is so studiedly the carefree cipher that he’s made himself the perfectly unknowable narcissist. Mooney is uninvested. I liked him a lot, but he’s a bad bet.
Ditto balding, loquacious lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke), setting up a “casual” meeting with his former songwriting partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) at a private club on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s soon-to-be smash stage production, Oklahoma!. He holds court at the downstairs bar telling stories a little south of ribald about past glories and future conquests, and his energy and easy bonhomie don’t crack until Rodgers appears, willing to partner again with the Hart who is a genius but not so much the Hart who is a congenital fuck-up. I know what this desperation feels like, this self- doubt and loathing–this suspicion that my best days are done before my motor’s run down and what will I do now? I know the feeling of talking long past the punchline and of eyes turning away.
I think folks were expecting Alex Garland’s Warfare to be a companion piece to his Civil War: a proper war movie that, like a cunning video-game simulation, set modern conventional warfare on the ground in the United States. What it is, instead, is an almost narrative-free few hours on the ground in the Middle East, where, for difficult-to-articulate reasons, our men and women are sent to secure individual city blocks, or individual buildings therein, just to be able to say they have. Long periods of anxious waiting are punctuated by sudden gouts of deafening, grotesque violence, and when the same brown dust settles over the bright red blood, restoring some notion of status quo, we start again: no wiser, no wealthier, just fewer. Also told as a vignette anthology, Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother essays three pairs of grown siblings as they interact with parents living, dying, or a memory haunting spaces they once occupied and things they once loved. A father is at the centre of the first study, a mother the second. In the last, siblings have been orphaned suddenly by a plane crash that is only lamented once by the sister, who whispers at the fragility of life. I love how adults here regress in the presence of their parents and still look to them for approval and affection. Nothing happens in either one of these films. They’re like Wallace Stevens poems mapping the borders of the nothings that aren’t there and the nothings that are and always will be.
I’ve never seen David Strathairn give a bad performance. His principled, outraged Everyman is tone-perfect when paired with John Sayles as part of his regular company. A reliable grounding wire for high concepts that might otherwise fly off into nonsense, he was wonderful as a blind analyst in Sneakers and a credible foil for Jason Bourne. As a dad struggling with a son who’s a bit of an asshole and a daughter-in-law who deserves better in Angus MacLachlan’s emotional gut-punch A Little Prayer, Strathairn runs the gamut from incredulous to righteous: ashamed enough of his wayward boy to intervene despite knowing better than to interfere. A Little Prayer reminded me a lot of the McLachlan-scripted Junebug, an intense character piece holding a magnifying glass up to the tensions testing a young marriage. There is a farewell late in the film that is an emotional touchpoint for 2025, as an old man shares the secret of happiness with a young woman, and the young woman says she knows–she’s only stayed as long as she has to warm herself in the company of his kindness.
Another small film about insurmountable obstacles, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby spares a moment in the worst period in doctoral candidate Agnes’s life to have a stray kitten approach her mid-panic attack in a remote parking lot. Immediately, Agnes (multi-hyphenate Victor) accepts all the comfort a random connection with an animal can provide…which is a lot. Then a stranger gives her a sandwich, and she allows the world to balance itself again between the polarities of predatory and nurturing. Agnes has been the pendulum in Sorry, Baby, wondering if there will ever be a return to the quotidian, if the sun will rise again after her trust in herself and others is shaken. Its currency is in grace, rage, and forgiveness, and its approach reminds me of Kelly Reichardt’s or Richard Linklater’s or MacLachlan’s. That’s where we are right now: too tired, dreaming of death, and hoping for some good news, finally, to talk us out of it before it’s too late.
Carson Lund’s Eephus is the film some people are mistaking Train Dreams for: an elegy for the passing of an age and the grief and culpability borne out by generations of men who should have done more, could have done more, but now it’s too late in the evening and there are only memories of places and things that may or may not have been. Here’s the death of the American Dream as embodied by, appropriately enough, the death of this one tiny capillary tributary of the Great American Pastime. I’ve written extensively about the kingdom of my memories, how it’s larger than my day-to-day and populated by more people I have known than people I know. How it keeps growing while my life keeps shrinking. There was one summer when I was a kid and I sat on a warm sidewalk and the world was as big as it was ever going to be for me, but I didn’t know it then. I know it now. Eephus captures a feeling so deeply, savagely unnameable that it took my breath away.
April is the “cruellest” month, Eliot proclaimed, and so Dea Kulumbegashvili’s devastating April essays the difficulties of obtaining even a legal abortion in the Eastern European state of Georgia. Centred on a sort of freelance abortionist played by Ia Sukhitashvili, the picture observes in long, unbroken shots the rigours of the work and the dangers attendant to it: non-sterile environments, constant chance of discovery, a lack of emergency services should something go wrong. I realized at some point that the soundtrack was made up of gasping–and then I realized the gasping was mine. Neither pro- nor anti-choice, April simply illustrates the consequences of attaching a social stigma to a medical procedure. The immense scale of the region’s natural beauty offers an almost surreal juxtaposition between the intimate, shattering invasiveness of what women are being put through and the unfathomable disinterest of an insensate nature. Paul Schrader asked in First Reformed if God will forgive us for what we’ve done. Pal, I don’t think He’s listening.
Filmmakers Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin once told me their key inspiration was French master Pierre Etaix, and you can see that influence in Splitsville, a phenomenal “bedroom comedy” that treats sex how it should be treated: as a very serious joke shared between friends. An early They Live-style brawl and a mentalist who can actually read minds both sent me, but not as much as the purity of the conversations had about friendship, marriage, commitment, and the importance of honesty in relationships, even if that honesty leads to hurt feelings and existential reevaluations. Everyone does yeoman’s work here in the 2025 picture–read: not Materialists–where Dakota Johnson’s specific style of alien anthropological excavation of human emotions is given the proper attention and payoff. Nothing is cheap in Splitsville. Indeed, a little kid telling his buddy that you never know how valuable something is until you steal it and crash it during a joyride provides the proper blueprint to surviving late Capitalism.
We are nearing the twentieth anniversary of the death of my friend, the Argentinian filmmaker Fabián Bielinsky, whose Nine Queens spearheaded a too-brief Argentinian New Wave. I thought about him while watching Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s extraordinary The Secret Agent: how much he would have loved it, its high-wire anxiety and 1970s-infused paranoia. I thought of him again during Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, another movie absolutely of the moment that suggests that if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention–and if you think someone’s after you, they are. Both films are about patriots trapped in the prisons their country has become, jailed by neighbours in countries that resemble open-air concentration camps rather than places hospitable for humans. Both are made by filmmakers in love with the language of film for all the usual reasons, but also because they see in the medium the means to communicate with spiritual ancestors, tie themselves to the places they’re from, and affect serious social change. These movies push us to know ourselves. They are warnings, but the fuse is already burned to the bomb. They reward us for knowing the history of film and how tides of revolution are often embedded in the rises and falls in film movements, like the spikes and valleys of a seismograph. Thinking about the people and things I’ve lost this year, I am amazed at my strength. I’ll stand with you if you stand. Please stand. The ruling class is terrified of our strength.
I watched 1,021 films this year, keeping track of them via spreadsheet. I recognize Letterboxd as a good tool for that sort of thing, I just don’t want it influencing what I watch. Of those 1,021 films, 382 of them were new releases, from which 50 titles represented 13%. Add 15 honourable mentions and that percentage of films I’m recommending through this piece is up to 17%. Add 10 more for friends, and we’re at 19.6%. Fewer than one in five films, in other words. I’m presenting numbers in preemptive response to any casual drive-by shots saying 50-title lists are a product of not making choices. Friends, choices were made.
I’ve maintained a cadence of 1,000 movies a year for decades because I’m of the belief that in order to do my job as a critic, writer, and film professor, I need to be voracious in my curiosity. There will come a point when I age out of this business, when things don’t make sense to me anymore and I’m no longer able to see the mysterious design of these endless years. I tell my students that if you want to be a better writer, read. And if you want to be a better filmmaker, watch. If there’s a thread out of this labyrinth, it will be wrapped around the spool of critical literacy.
The two best films of 2025 are summaries of the year’s major themes. How does a broken family begin to heal itself? How do we finally dismantle the systems that convince us to trade our humanity for the profits of the least of us? I know dawn must be coming, because I can’t remember when it’s been darker. I know I’m not alone, because this luminous art of ours tells me so.
