The year 2025 was not a particular shining beacon for cinema in my eyes; I had a hard time filling out my traditional top 10 + 10 honorable mentions. This is driven partially by the fact that I saw fewer new releases this year (well fewer than 100), but then again that was driven by the fact that I had fewer movies I wanted to see.
Still, even an off year for cinema has a bunch of gems, and oh boy do I love the movies listed below.
(An aside: I considered ditching top 10 lists in 2023 in favor of just The B.A.D.S., but my friend, Mitch, co-host of The Movie Call Podcast, encouraged me to continue. He and co-host Sam posted their own top 10s in podcast form the past week: honorable mentions, #10-6, #5-1.)
10. The Woman in the Yard
Putting this film in my top ten is a bit of a reflexive action in defense of the unfairly panned Blumhouse horror film. The Woman in the Yard is a stunning achievement of cinematography and imagery by Jaume Collet-Serra and DP Pawel Pogorzelski in spite of its simple premise and screenplay. Danielle Deadwyler is sensational in the lead, and its reckoning with grief is well-realized (though it does not escape “about trauma” accusations). I also like the swing of the ending, a knife held to the throat of each viewer for them to decide between radical optimism or bleak surrender.
9. F1
F1 is essentially Top Gun: Maverick reskinned from combat jets to race cars. But is that a bad thing? We all loved Maverick! The film has a rock-solid execution of the classic Bull Durham clash between veteran and greenhorn teammates. But the reason we’re all here is not the script or even Brad Pitt’s star power but the master-class racing action, which is both bone-rattling and surprisingly varied and dynamic for such a repetitive sport.
8. Sinners
Messy but satisfying as both a period drama and a high-voltage horror-thriller, Sinners benefits from a great cast and the clear vision of Ryan Coogler. It presents a deep well of ideas about racial violence, cultural appropriation, and how hot Hailee Steinfeld is.
7. Bugonia
A just-right blend of satire and kidnapping thriller brought to life by best-of-the-year performances from Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. The story takes some incredible swings, but they all land. Yorgos Lanthimos earns his bitter, strange filmmaking voice here.
6. Weapons
The biggest surprise of the year for me, in that I kind of hated Zach Cregger’s debut Barbarian, and yet all the reasons I said I did are the reasons I loved his sophomore effort. The chopped up structure works both in expanding the story’s world and simmering the tension, the mean humor lands more often than not, the acting deepens the story, and it all feels like an original synthesis with a lot to say rather than an overcooked gotcha.
5. One Battle After Another
I still haven’t fully cracked Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our major filmmakers and yet a beguiling, uneven creator whose work may or may not have a coherent thematic and storytelling throughline. Like I said, I’m still trying to work it out. But, sure enough, our Best Picture wowed me and moved me more often than it frustrated me. In a cinematic era where lots of auteurs are making big messy statements about modern politics that double as thrillers, PTA’s is the first that feels both fully engaged with the high stakes and cautiously hopeful we can make it through the quagmire.
4. Sorry, Baby
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one” is a line said by Jojen in the fifth Song of Ice and Fire book by George RR Martin, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. You can substitute in “movie-lover” to the same effect. Sorry, Baby, the wonderful debut by Eva Victor, lets us live the complicated life of Agnes, and leaves our souls richer on the other side. Victor offers a wonderful buffet of tones filtered through the idiosyncratic but moving voice of its director-writer-star: funny and devastating, tender and broad. Sorry, Baby is an instant minor classic.
3. The Phoenician Scheme
I will say it every chance I get: we should not take for granted that such a visionary as Wes Anderson gives us a fully-formed triumph year in and year out. The Phoenician Scheme offers nothing special from the director, except a powerful and hilarious story about reckoning with the weight of our actions and how we pass that on to the next generation, with inimitable comic timing and visual grace. You know, nothing special.
2. Eephus
It’s Dazed and Confused for arthritic ballplayers. Carson Lund, who served as cinematographer of two of my favorite oddball films of the past decade (Ham on Rye and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point), makes his directorial debut with this baseball hangout movie about one last game at a stadium about to be bulldozed, and it’s an immense achievement. Eephus is full of hysterical non-sequiturs, quirky line deliveries, sports ephemera, and a poetic weight about the end of an era that’s difficult to articulate.
1. Twinless
In a year filled with movies with surprising tone shifts and genre U-turns, Twinless delivers the most confident and satisfying confection of the bunch. The script is clever and surprising, and Dylan O’Brien elevates the material with a career-defining turn. Director-writer-co-star James Sweeney shows a love for both The Talented Mr. Ripley and Mary Kate and Ashley straight-to-VHS capers, and he channels the precision of a lightweight Wes Anderson in his shot construction. And though it pulls the best from all those influences, Twinless is a true original and my favorite film of the year.
The next ten
(Sorted alphabetically)
- Blue Moon (review)
- Drop (review)
- Hal & Harper (miniseries) (capsule)
- It Was Just An Accident
- KPop Demon Hunters (review)
- Not Just a Goof (review)
- Nouvelle Vague (review)
- Sacramento (my #11) (review)
- The Secret Agent (review)
- Wake Up Dead Man (capsule) (I guess… rough year)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.
3 replies on “The Top 10 Movies of 2025”
I remain deeply embarrassed that one missed THE PHOENECIAN SCHEME whilst it was in cinemas.
One should also admit to not actually having seen any of your Top Ten (Though I’m not actually certain why that was the case).
Wow! Thank you for the shoutout. I think just your writing that makes me that more likely to try again next year. I always think I’m gonna phone it in the next year. But like Al Pacino in Godfather 3, “Every time I think I’m out..:they pull me right back in!!”
I was most happy to see Bugonia on here. More than once I’ve felt that should have been on mine or at least Sam’s! But it being on yours makes me feel better too.
A big regret about not watching woman in black because you recommended it twice. And it feels like a movie you watch the year it came out or never.
Your description of twinless as one part ripley and the other part MK&A is hilarious. I was surprised it wasn’t on Sam’s list. Gonna send this over to him.
I would say OBAA another succeeds in a way no other movie did for me: I thought about it and talked about it probably more than any other.
Keep beating the Wes Anderson drum! I’m in time with you.
EEPHUS. “God knows I was feeling alive!”
Thanks so much for the shout out!!!
The Movie Call Podcast is a big fan!!!