Boy, this year fucking sucks, huh? Between every shitty thing in the news to the geniuses we’ve lost (RIP David Lynch, Sly Stone, Gene Hackman, Jeff Baena, Val Kilmer, Brian Wilson, David Johannson, Roberta Flack and so many more wonderful people that I can’t mention without this just turning into a memorial wall), it can be pretty hard to see any daylight amid all the clouds. That’s a cute metaphor, but it feels somewhat true: What glimmers of light we’ve got are small and hard to come by, and I, for one, think we should cherish every one of them. So for this new Half-Year In ReView series, we put together a list of our 10 favorite films of the year so far — not the best, obviously, because that implies a level of objectivity that’s boring and inhuman — for us all to appreciate together. Or, more likely, for us all to argue about and get mad at each other because that’s just the way the internet works.
The good thing about these half-year lists is that there are still six months of cinema left before we get to watch Anderson Cooper drunkenly embarrass himself in Times Square, and a lot of good stuff is on the way. Together hits screens at the end of the month, which should be at the top of your list to check out if you’re a horror fan. Rose Byrne fans need to hold out for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which will hopefully not sit on a shelf for too much longer. I’m seeing Superman next week, which I’m pretty excited about. So, bring on the rest of 2025, and you better bet you’ll be seeing at least three of these films on my top ten at the end of the year. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which three.
Black Bag
From our March review: “There’s little field work seen and no super-spy heroics here, replaced by small-time fireworks in the barbs that the characters frequently hurl at one another. It is, like Le Carre, never once boring, as the ‘black bags’ of the title — referring to the cache of work-related secrets that an intelligence agent must keep from the ones closest to them — spill open and reveal the frequently-ugly personal shit that accompanies the professional. What keeps Black Bag electric is the perfect marriage between Koepp’s writing, the ensemble’s work, and Soderbergh’s dynamic skill as an editor. At 93 minutes, he never has a second to spare, and his ability to create suspense from conversation is put to great use. It feels odd to apply the old saying — ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ — to a dialogue-heavy feature, but the ceaseless momentum that Soderbergh creates in the edit is an invaluable part of the film’s success. It’s shock-and-awe cinema of the most subtle kind, which has been a feature of the director’s work this decade. All I can say is, ‘More, please.'”
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “You’re putting this on here instead of this movie that I, a hypothetical complainant, prefer?” And the only answer I have to that is “Yes.” It is, after all, my list, and I’m going to use a spot to say how much I appreciate Gerard Butler and this entirely moronic franchise, which has more laughs-per-minute than Friendship and better action than Ballerina. If you’re not on board with Big Nick and his continuing misadventures with Ice Cube’s kid, well, stop being such a lame-o. In all seriousness, Butler’s unhinged performance blends beautifully with the masterfully crafted heist at the end of the film, giving us one of 2025’s strangest pleasures. I genuinely don’t think this will wind up on one of these lists or anywhere outside of my “honor roll” when we do this again in December. So, this deserves a moment in the sun.
F1
From our June review: “There’s an old dad-like pithy adage about how a NASCAR broadcast is just a bunch of drivers turning left for 300 laps, and the distance a camera provides helps elide the fact that you’re going, oh, 200 MPH. Make a minor mistake, and ten seconds later, you and 10 other of your fellow drivers will not only be out of the race but most likely on fire and/or horribly injured. This is what Kosinski’s emphasizing here: You have to be crazy to do something this dangerous. But without that danger, without that risk, there is no way to reach that great, ephemeral reward. Not victory. Sonny won’t even hold the trophy when it’s all said and done. Bad luck. What you need is speed. The closest you can get on land to flight. The moment when man and machine push the limits of the possible and the zen flow takes over. That’s why people race, that’s what Kosinski accurately captures through his filmmaking, and it’s why F1 is one of the best movies of the summer, if not the year.”
The Life of Chuck
From our June review: “Does Flanagan approach treacle territory? Are we going to coin “Flanagan-corn” after this? Well, yes and no. The movie does veer towards those territories near the end, but Flanagan preserves King’s structure as a bitter reminder of the context informing it. But saccharine or not, all I really ask from these types of movies is that they earn the tears they wring from the audience, and ‘The Life of Chuck’ earns every last drop it spills. Coming out of the Princess of Wales on Saturday night, I was surrounded by sniffling, mascara-smeared people who had been moved to a more outwardly apparent extent than I was. Yet I’m sure we were still thinking of similar things: Loved ones, either passed on or present, or the expanded surveys of what we were doing with our time on this planet.”
The Monkey
From our February review: “The Monkey has all the trademarks of what should be a letting-off-steam feature, a lighter companion to the heaviness of Longlegs, and I’d agree — this is a ‘fuckin’ around’ b-side compared to the last feature. But you’d be stunned to discover how many classic songs were consigned to the other side of the 45, at the least the first go-round: ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ ‘Into the Groove,’ ‘How Soon is Now?,’ ‘We Will Rock You.’ So, yeah, I love ‘William, It Was Really Nothing,’ too, but I know a true blue classic when I hear it. Likewise, The Monkey is a great and absurdly entertaining time at the movies, requiring no explanations or disclaimers for you to enjoy. Just turn the key and see what happens.”
Pee-Wee as Himself
From our January review: “Wolf’s disappointment gives way to something much more complex when it’s revealed that Reubens recorded a short audio clip for the director the day before he died, in which he tries to answer as much as he can. He wanted to clear his name and try to recast his life in a more accurate light than what the tabloids would have you remember him as. It is a fucking heartbreaking scene, with pastoral shots of the views from Reubens’ L.A. home – cats at the sliding doors, deer in the Hollywood hills, a lynx resting near the pool – giving a sort of aesthetic glimpse into what he might have seen in his last moments, his voice straining as he tries to get these final words out to the world. And, for all of their fears about how Pee-wee as Himself would turn out, it feels as if Wolf and Reubens had their goals realized: Reubens presents himself as a complex, charismatic, bitchy, funny, human being full of unexamined depth, and Wolf gets the chance to tell his story as only he can.”
The Phoenician Scheme
It’s been somewhat bizarre to see the full and total pushback to Wes Anderson’s latest feature because, out of all of the films that he’s made in the last decade, this is probably the closest to those Earlier, Funnier Movies that everyone wishes he’d go back to making. Problem is, he’s not the same filmmaker who was palling around with Owen and Luke Wilson and bugging Pauline Kael to watch Rushmore. So, this stylish thriller — about a grifter/arms dealer and his mumbo-jumbo machinations to rip off his partners in the scheme of the title — is a modern Wes Anderson feature with a deliciously wicked sense of humor. It’s no Fantastic Mr. Fox, but it’s a very funny comedy, which is a decent break from the heaviness of his last two features (I never watched the Roald Dahl shorts, so I can’t comment on that). Plus it’s the best Michael Cera turn since Wally Brando showed up on Twin Peaks: The Return, so that’s enough to put it here.
Presence
From our January review: “If filmed traditionally, Presence would still be a really accomplished little thriller — horror film doesn’t feel like the right phrase here, given the directions that the plot takes, as well as its lack of full in-your-face scares — as it has a well-rendered story and solid characters, performed by a quartet of actors each turning in fantastic work. Sullivan and Liang are the standouts, but all of the key actors can embrace the contradictions within each of them and make them feel compellingly honest. But Soderbergh’s style is enthralling in ways that are hard to quantify. I’d heard it described as a ‘movie entirely filmed in Raimi-cam’ (thanks, Batz), but it’s a bit different in practice, owing more to classical masters of suspense like Hitchcock (with Rope seemingly being a major influence) or De Palma than a lot of other Steadicam-using genre filmmakers. And that’s not a diss to masters like Raimi or Carpenter — indeed, the latter feels very present here, in just how seamlessly the camera glides from room to room — it’s just a different aesthetic ethos. Yet it also feels similar in practice to a lower-scale version of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void with a tad more formal restraint (financiers only have the cash for one depiction of the psychedelic cycles of death every quarter-century, after all). It’s intensely well-planned, with hyper-precise blocking and camera movement, and it’s astonishing just how gentle it all feels, at least up until it isn’t playing nice anymore.”
The Shrouds
From our September review: “Cronenberg has spent the better part of the last decade in mourning himself – his frequent collaborator and partner Carolyn passed away in 2017 from a rare form of cancer, much like Becca does in the film – and has taken the time to work through and understand the oddity of his grief, as well as its complexity. Hence the varied emotional palette that he paints with here, as the elegy grows less straightforward in its anhedonia as time passes: the world still turns, the good memories co-exist with the pain and surface more frequently, and though one can never fully heal, they can appreciate, say, the flubbing of a first date or a random sexual encounter with a person who is turned on by conspiracy theories. And, for a filmmaker who lives and dies on the conceptual swerve, making a Hitchcock riff (albeit one with plenty of Cronenberg’s pet sounds) out of your mourning is perhaps the most and least apparent way to process your grief publicly. In context, I think Crimes is the film that the blurb-writer was talking about — an epochal declaration of the end of a form of man, one so thoroughly changed by the modern world that he requires a different form of sustenance to survive. The death of normalcy defines that film, with whatever hopefulness about the changing form of man smothered by a sensation of painful dread, much like one might feel when waking up three weeks after a funeral to discover an empty bed and a new reality that they exist in. The Shrouds, in form and tone, accurately depicts what happens when you live in that world for three or four years, where your reality might be slightly warped compared to what everyone else experiences but still vaguely exists in agreed-upon reality.”
Sinners
From our April review: “‘Sinners‘ bears many of the hallmarks of a traditional Coogler picture. Michael B. Jordan is front-and-center, Ludwig Göransson is back for the score, the action scenes work wonderfully, and at the core, there’s a celebration of Black life and culture which endures and thrives even when persecuted by the Good Ol’ Boys holding the levers of power. His focus here is on the blues, as the art was before it got appropriated wholesale by a generation of boomer dads hitting each syllable in the word ‘margarita’ like it were a heavy bag. Yet the blues was more than just the music; it was an entire way of life, as shown by all the elements that must come together for one Mississippi Delta juke joint to operate.”