If I had to pick one word to describe 2025 — just in general, not at the movies — it’d be “uncertain.” Not “ambiguous” or an equivalent synonym, given that there’s plenty of clearly awful things going on each day, but the kind of uncertainty that pairs well with a sense of foreboding dread. We’re stuck in a bleak comedy of fatal errors, with the sentiment of the moment ultimately summed up accurately by “Well, that’d be funny if it weren’t so damn sad.”
This uncertainty is getting worse, too: you can feel it in every AI-generated clip or image clogging up one’s timeline or front page (or the front page of the NYT website), and the requisite jobs and/or learned skills that would have been needed to achieve the same result are being replaced by robotic prompting. I’m sure that, when the bubble pops, we’ll be grateful that the S&P 500 bet so much on a tech that seems to be mostly useful for making shitposts and deepfakes. No, AI’s contribution is that it exponentially increased the already-exhausting amount of bullshit in online spaces, leading to more malaise. The day one can’t go to World Star Hip-Hop and find themselves a fight comp unmolested by the image-generating bastard children of SmarterChild is when people might pack up and decide to go outside again.
It was nice to see James Cameron come out with both barrels against this trend in a short video that played before my screening of Avatar: Fire and Ash, where he acknowledged that it takes a legion of actors, artists, animators, and more to bring his feline fantasies to life*. Most developments in the tech space have an antisocial feel about them now — the end product is, after all, usually designed to be used in the comfort of one’s own home — and his repudiation of AI emphasized the collaborative and communal nature of filmmaking. The same can be said for the experience of watching a movie in a theater, or attending a local film festival, or just watching random clips from Jack Ryan: Shadow Agent on the muted TV at the bar. One engages with the audience as much as they do the film itself, and it’s terrifying to imagine what Netflix might do to the theatrical landscape in favor of reducing the refined craft of a near century-and-a-half into indistinguishable flashes and noise to be ignored while one scrolls through TikTok. What one person sees as entertainment nirvana — the ability to generate their own tailor-made content from a string of words — is another’s proof that Forster was on to something with “The Machine Stops.”
This is a lot to say that I dread the day when I can no longer have experiences like the ones I had at the cinema in 2025. Most of these selections — my favorite movies of the year — were enhanced by the crowds I saw them with. From Hamnet, which had the stuffiest critics at TIFF sobbing; to the finale of Sinners, where, when Michael B. Jordan began ripping through Klansmen with a BAR and tommy gun, my audience broke out into the kind of applause I hadn’t heard since Get Out all the way until the credits; to the exhilarating experience of watching F1 with a loved one (I’m sure other people reacted, too, but I couldn’t hear them over the IMAX sound system): all of these movies would still be good had I only watched them at home, but they were made meaningful by seeing them with others.
Fostering and contributing to communities — be they family, friends, fellow enthusiasts, nerds, or volunteers — is really the only way to soothe one’s soul in precarious times. So, I’d like to extend a sincere thank you to my fellow writers at Vanyaland for all they do, and to you for reading what I’ve written in the past year. I’m excited for ‘26, despite all evidence suggesting that I shouldn’t be, and part of that excitement comes from being able to share with you in the joy that this art form can bring. So, to wrap things up: if you can see one of these features in a theater, go out and check it out; if you want to stream one, invite a friend over. Put the laundry away — if you keep folding, the dorks win.
As always, here’s our Honor Roll:
After the Hunt, Anemone, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Black Bag, Bring Her Back, Caught Stealing, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Eternity, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Freaky Tales, Is This Thing On, Keeper, The Legend of Ochi, The Mastermind, A Minecraft Movie, The Monkey, The Naked Gun, Nobody 2, One Battle After Another, Opus, Pee-Wee as Himself, The Phoenician Scheme, Presence, Roofman, The Running Man, Serious People, SLY LIVES!, The Smashing Machine, Superman, Together, Warfare
And here are my favorite movies of 2025, with accompanying superlatives.
Best Feature-Length Oscar Hammerstein Slam: Blue Moon
From my review: “As you might expect, Hawke is ferociously brilliant as Hart, and if you’d like to describe it as a “tour de force” or whatever other example from the Great American Book of Critical Cliches, feel free to do so. A picture of this performance should be on the goddamned dust jacket. His timing is impeccable, with the placement of his bon mots driving the rhythm of the conversation; his accentuation of Hart’s strange physiology works better than any of Linklater’s in-camera attempts to portray it; and he has a clear understanding of the emotion animating all of the character’s anxieties and desperation. He’s afraid of his irrelevance as much as he’s scared of remaining unloved, the social death being, ultimately, worse than the real one. Hawke is nearly unparalleled in authentically capturing the stress choking a character and the veneers they put up to mask it, but it’s rarely applied in a fashion this potent, ensuring every other performer on screen gets the “thankless” descriptor when one sits down to describe their still-ample contributions to the film. Scott is exceptionally well-cast, complimenting Hawke’s single-minded dynamism by maintaining an air of ambiguity, where one’s unsure where the frustrated disappointment and genuine admiration for his former partner begins. Canavale is the perfect comedic compliment with his brassy exterior and unexpected grace, and Qualley maintains an ethereal presence, the fictional manifestation of a thousand of Hart’s real-life failed relationships, women and men who he could only admire from a distance, yearning.“
Best Depiction of Comfy yet Alien Extraterrestrial Life: Bugonia
From my review: “His imagery is as mundane as it was in Killing of a Sacred Deer – aside from the splashes of natural beauty and the richness of Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, the surroundings are kept as mild as possible to contrast with the oddity of the behavior shown on screen – until it isn’t, the weird bursting through with an astonishingly vivid yet visceral quality. This mirrors the story, in which the façade breaks down over time, slowly revealing the raw otherworldly emotions contained within placid exteriors. What’s remarkable about Tracy’s script is that it isn’t as didactic as I would have expected from the guy who wrote The Menu and, before that, jokes for John Oliver. It’s a remarkably empathetic film, especially given the brutal paces it puts its characters through, though it comes with caveats, ensuring that we never like anybody too much. Each time Tracy notices us straying too close to full-on identification with a member of his ensemble, he pulls us back to baseline with a new and deliciously macabre detail that complicates our vision of them. Feel too bad for the circumstances that Plemons’ character is in? Well, just wait until you see what’s behind the false wall in his basement. Feel like Stone is getting treated too well as a power-hungry CEO? Well, what she’s got in the closet of her office might make you think twice. The only character that remains innocent is Don, who grows increasingly more uncomfortable with what he’s witnessing, and, as such, his arc is the truly tragic one. Delbis’s work here is brilliant, squaring off with the likes of a fully-terrifying Jesse Plemons and a steely, otherworldly Emma Stone, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.”
Best Reason to Get Pulled Over That Doesn’t Include the Phrase “A Few Small Beers:” F1
From my review: “But like Maverick, F1 is never, ever boring. The schedule of a Formula One season ensures that the next race always comes at a fast clip, where we can join Sonny and Noah behind their wheels and fly across the grid. The Mann and Frankenheimer-inspired camera angles ensure that we’re immersed in the action in a way that feels close-to-tactile, and the name of the game is full immersion. One shot – a tour-de-force moment – puts us directly inside Sonny’s helmet as the five lights fade from the countdown timer and the race starts. The subtle head movements inform you where to look, but the scene challenges your perspective and reaction time, putting you right in the moment, in which the complexity of Sonny’s task becomes clear.”
Best Dog: Good Boy
From my review: “Leonberg’s ethos behind the project is fascinating – using supernatural evil to highlight the almost otherworldly affection shown to Todd by his pet: a creature who will never, ever let him down, no matter what happens or how he feels. The whole “we don’t deserve dogs” saying can be tritely rendered into a greeting card or plaque you can buy at a TJ Maxx, but there’s truth to it. For all of the miserable things about human existence, the fact that there are creatures – be it a dog or a cat or a rabbit or hamster or so on and so forth – whose care for us extends beyond the fact that we feed them and give them attention acts as a strange counter to the idea that our existence is irredeemable, that we’re damned wretches unworthy of love by some inherent flaw. It’s a relationship that can transcend death, after all, given that dogs have fantastic memories — a surreal devotion that slips beyond a lifetime, often being more than we’re worth but precisely what we need. It’s in this meaning that Good Boy stops being merely a good gimmick picture (isn’t that what all cinema is, anyhow?), and turns into sublime, poetic horror.”
Best Reason to Skip Eternity at TIFF (because you can’t stop tearing up): Hamnet
From my review: “The same can be said for Zhao, who has made one hell of a comeback after the disaster that was Eternals, proving that the bastards at Marvel couldn’t keep the director of rich works like The Rider and Nomadland down. Her direction is patient and still, never distracting from the moment while being formally impressive. The careful treatment of the pastoral setting (the film is gorgeously lensed by Zone of Interest cinematographer Łukasz Żal) and the rich performances result in a feature that resembles what might happen if modern-day Malick decided to ditch the steadicam and pick up a tripod. It’s lush and deeply poetic — her vision is tinged with a literary fire that makes it all the more devastating when the supernatural elements are introduced (it’s not “fantasy,” or whatever — it’s just an acknowledgment of a character’s belief system through their interactions with the sublime).”
Best Hamster: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
From my review: “This perspective into the myopic panic-spiral is what I appreciate so much about If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You — it feels so accurate to lived experience, as ridiculous as it often can be, that it’s hard to quantify. There’s a fitting relationship between pattern recognition and confirmation bias that takes hold when you’re in the grip of miserable luck, where you can’t imagine things getting better and everything around seems to be doing its best to prove to you that you’re right. Like Linda, you try to place the blame on something concrete — that guy’s an asshole, that was an accident, etc. — until the situation gets so frustrating that you can only turn it on yourself. Is it narcissistic? Sure, but if the only thing you can change is yourself in these circumstances, blaming your own feelings for the spectacular run of bad luck you’ve had is pretty much the only way to get through it. We all can’t be Job — sometimes, the only way to shore is to get pelted by the waves.”
Best Mark Hamill Performance: The Life of Chuck
From my review: “You should expect, however, a well-meaning and genuinely moving exploration of the concept that “all we have is now,” to quote from when the Flaming Lips were still a good band. I think the reason I fully reject the kind of “cozy catastrophe” cinema is that it feels artistically stilted and banal, a repetition of the same old disaster narratives simply awash in detachment. It’s often good for still imagery, but it makes for a soulless cinema in which the characters accept what is happening to them without even so much as a hint of processing. They’re so thoroughly numbed to their reality that they can’t even register even an approximation of emotion, which is not a plea for every actor in one of those films to break free of the mold and start chewing the scenery, but rather just an ask that those who create these kinds of tones watch The Life of Chuck and see how Flanagan handles these topics in that opening act.”
Best American Film of 2025: Marty Supreme
From my review: “Stress. That’s the operative word here. I’m sure you’ll hear plenty of discussion about how stressful it is to watch Marty Supreme, much like it was when Uncut Gems came out, but there’s been little in the way of discussion as to why that is and how Safdie achieves that effect. There’s an element of sensory overload to those scenes – oftentimes, they’re not actually suspenseful or nerve-wracking. Instead, they’re overwhelming, with a cacophony of Altman-esque cross-talk scattering our attention across the sound mix, throwing us off balance until Safdie gives us a detail to focus on. The pace has a similar ethos, in which the narrative beats are started like balls heading through a perpetual motion machine: as soon as you think it’s come to a stop, you come to find they’re being reloaded, soon to drop back down through the tubing and levers. Much like one of those machines, Safdie has precisely engineered this feature, fine-tuning it to ensure seamless operation, with every diversion and descent into chaos expertly slotted to fire every single synapse and activate every pleasure receptor in one’s brain. Marty Supreme is as much of a visceral pleasure as it is an intellectual one, and it’s one of the best movies of 2025. There. There’s your mic drop.”
Best Overall Film of 2025: No Other Choice
From my review: “Park’s direction is so seamless and smooth, and his style never draws an absurd amount of attention to its flourishes, as there aren’t any signposts telling us to Pay Attention To The Cool Thing He’s Doing On Screen. It’s all about flow, and this makes him a natural fit for the kind of comedy he’s made ever since The Handmaiden. His Hitchcockian riffs are almost effortlessly funny (see Decision to Leave, which wasn’t even billed as one and was still perhaps the funniest movie of the year it released in) and No Other Choice has an asset the others don’t in Lee, a brilliant comedian who refuses to save face and plunges himself face-first into each and every pratfall and absurd conflict. There’s an incredible scene featuring the most bizarre Mexican standoff put to film in which the participants are trying and failing to shout their disagreements over a cacophonous stereo system, and Lee’s baffled reactions, frayed nerves, and jittery movements go a long way towards making it as instantly iconic as it is.”
Best Leg: The Secret Agent
The word that best sums up Kleber Mendonça Filho’s towering epic is “cinematic.” This is a movie that is utterly in love with its art form, and especially its place in Brazilian culture at the time of its setting. Anchored by a brilliant performance from Wagner Moura as a professor fleeing assassins and the military dictatorship that controlled ‘70s Brazil, Filho has concocted a heady brew of genre cinema, spiced with the intrigue of a political thriller. Where else will you see a two-faced cat or a severed leg attacking a cruising spot in a public park? Or Udo Kier’s final performance? Nowhere else.
Best Proof that Stellan Skarsgard Would Be an Incredible Hang: Sentimental Value
Had Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World been released by a studio outfit, it would have essentially been the perfect major-label debut for the Norwegian filmmaker. It’s a funny, tender, tragic drama about the foibles of growing up in a creative family and alienating your children by making them your muses, featuring stellar turns by Renate Reinsave, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, and the inimitable Stellan Skarsgard. Beautifully written, handsomely shot, dynamically staged, and masterfully edited — it doesn’t get much better than this in the crossover prestige space, and no wonder audiences (and awards bodies) are responding so enthusiastically to it.
Best Take-down of Riverdance: Sinners
From my review: “Sinners is a great movie, top-shelf entertainment to be poured in special celebratory moments, and it’s so exciting to see that studio life hasn’t crushed Coogler’s ability or imagination. Just look at the sweeping sequence in the middle of the film, in which phantoms of cultures past and present inhabit the juke during one of Sammie’s numbers on the guitar, the camera careening across the dance floor as the song reaches its apex and the roof literally and figuratively catches on fire. That’s some real good shit right there.”
Best Refutation of That Scene in Adaptation Where Brian Cox Goes Off About Voiceovers: Train Dreams
From my review: “Yet, as much as I understand and respect their analysis, I think it sells both films short. To say nothing of the complex web of characters and emotions Dominik weaves, Jesse James uses that opening sequence to craft a mythopoetic figure that Brad Pitt’s character can’t and won’t ever live up to, romancing us in the same way the dime novels did to Casey Affleck. Behold the man, it tells us, as we contemplate the back of his neck as he adjusts the picture frame. Bentley uses similar words, but he substitutes the “the” for “this.” Behold this man, a forgotten figure who, like the rest of us, contains much more beauty than we’re ever able to understand or express through our own imperfect means. It’s why, when Edgerton stares into the distance, contemplating some unknown sight on the horizon, we’re immersed in his feeling rather than distant observers. It’s sublime, in the literary sense of the word: Enlivened by the details of the natural world, aware of just how small we are, of how little our lives really matter in the grand scheme of our ecosystems. Yet that just makes it all the more precious, doesn’t it?”
Best Hot Dog Sight-Gag: Weapons
From my review: “This isn’t like Barbarian, where the meaning isn’t exactly obvious yet… perfect, once you think about it. I think that’s where the Peele comparison, beyond the funny factoid I began with, really lies: My sympathies have always been with Us, which is an ambitious and complex work that could also be considered mealy-mouthed and meaningless by folks who like their parables didactic. If Peele extended The Dark Half to the entire nation to illustrate our divides, Cregger has synthesized the Grimms’ work into a grim study of manipulation and exploitation — a subject that never quite loses its relevance – yet maintains enough distance to allow for dozens of reads, all of which are perfect for debate at the pizza place following the screening you went to with your friends. As such, I predict the arguments over Weapons will be nearly as fun as the movie itself. Nearly.”
* Two things: first, only a few billion dollars in ticket sales separates this visionary epic from being clowned on like Megalopolis, given that they’re both explicitly weird and bizarrely sexual works advocating for their director’s ideal societies (also, they’re both interesting and compelling features). Second, has anyone ever asked Cameron if getting dosed with acid on the Titanic set helped him come up with the genesis for these movies?