2025 was an exceptionally stellar year for cinema, its greatness profoundly, inversely proportionate to 2025 as a year for basically anything else. The cinematic richness and the sociopolitical direness (especially in the United States) were often hard to separate. Films such as Eddington, One Battle After Another, and Bugonia furiously and creatively captured the head-spinning derangements of the country's current dystopia, reviving a spirit of acerbic political critique that perhaps hasn't been truly seen on the big screen since the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Such invigorated social consciousness resonated in national cinemas around the world, taking shape in stories about political prisoners, military dictatorships, washed-up poets, imperialist conquests, and possessed household appliances. It was exciting to see, and proof that art remains among our most vital and versatile tools for processing the mess of the world.
My top ten films of 2025 are after the jump...
10.
The Mastermind revolves around a time-tested character, and one who tellingly appears in various permutations in films from 2025: the disaffected, socially impotent man of unearned confidence. Josh O'Connor exquisitely embodies this man as a wannabe master art thief whose best-laid plans quickly fall apart against the backdrop of a larger, more significant fiasco, the Vietnam War. His ironic reckoning, in one of the year's most perfect endings, caps off a stinging indictment of myopia and self-interest.
9.
There's something going around, and despite what the loudmouth kid says, you can't just wash it off. The contaminant in Polinger's prodigiously unnerving debut feature isn't quite puberty, although it is that too; it's mostly the toxic social behavior among adolescent boys whose capacity for cruelty seemingly knows no limits. In a miraculously good cast of juvenile actors, Kayo Martin is a bullying pest par excellence, and Everett Blunck is the model of the shy, sweet-natured kid who just wants to make it out of adolescence alive, sanity be damned.
8.
Strange River is another film about the awkwardness, anxiety, and mystery of adolescence, but unlike The Plague, its coming-of-age story takes on the form of a soothing, sensuous summer reverie. The film contains my favorite cinematography of the year courtesy Pablo Paloma, who uses 16 mm, color, and natural light in ways that positively radiate from the screen. I can still see Jan Monter's piercing azure eyes and their steady, enigmatic gaze; verdant trees and shimmering water; skin reddened by sun and hickeys. The coupling of pubescent angst and desire has rarely felt so tactile.
7.
Wes Anderson has finally abandoned his overwrought nesting-doll narratives (at least for now), and the result is his best, leanest, and funniest feature since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel over a decade ago. He's aided by fabulous comic performances from Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, and Michael Cera, and, as ever, inventive and immaculate design work by Adam Stockhausen and Milena Canonero, among others. No single line delighted me more than the impregnable Zsa Zsa Korda's refrain, "Myself, I feel very safe."
6.
Supercharged by a virtuosic Rose Byrne in what feels like a landmark kind of screen performance, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is a blistering, blackly hilarious portrait of the battle scars of mother/womanhood. Byrne's Linda is a cinematic mamma of Anna Magnani-like intensity and complexity, a hurricane of vexation, antipathy, desperation, and hardscrabble tenacity tasked with performing maternal and professional care even at her lowest. Ingeniously cast against type as the calmest person here, Conan O'Brien is a perfect foil in this churning psychic stew.
5.
It was a banner year for first-time feature filmmakers, with Alex Russell being among three to make my list. His taut, juicy psychological thriller trains a laser focus on social media phenomena — influencer culture, online parasociality — and caustically, devilishly exposes how they stoke some of our most primal hungers. The imbricated hearts of the film are the sensational Théodore Pellerin and Archie Madekwe, who form an indelible pas de deux of homosocial/erotic longing, competition, resentment, and finally and most pointedly, identification.
4.
Lav Diaz's Magellan is both an epic and an anti-epic; it manages to be at once a captivating sensory experience and a repudiation of the bombastic spectacle that historically characterizes narratives of Western conquest. Diaz is as focused on the barbarity, hypocrisy, and small-mindedness of Magellan and his motley crew as he is on the cultures, customs, and attitudes of the indigenous communities they brutalized. This is stunning filmmaking that cogently demonstrates anti-colonial resistance in both story and form.
3.
The term "ghost story" gets thrown around a lot by critics, often as a metaphor for the qualities of memory when it's not describing the overtly supernatural. Sound of Falling ably fits both meanings; its conjuring of the psychic states of several women across three generations is so potently visceral — and at times ambiguously magical — it unfolds like a genuine séance. With some of the year's most sinuous, breathtaking camerawork and sound design, Schilinski captures an embodied sense of memory as a haunting reverberation, a cross-temporal contagion we might not even consciously perceive.
2.
Do not adjust your screen, or question your eyesight; Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf carries a native image resolution of 240p, and it's one of the most gorgeous-looking films of 2025. This is the filmmaker's second feature shot on a 2006 Sony Ericsson phone camera, and he wields the outmoded technology like a giddy child playing with a full box of paints. Using pixelation, smeary colors, and a lagging light sensor as aesthetic tools, he produces a surplus of spellbinding visual effects that put the crystal clarity of high-definition to shame. The twinkling, jaunty score from Koberidze's brother Giorgi is the cherry on top.
1.
Here's a ghost story, a very literal one, in which the ghosts do what they really ought to: be a persistent thorn in the side of capitalists and authoritarians. Ratchapoom's absurdist, clever, defiantly queer, and all-around exhilarating fantasia constantly twists and turns before arriving at a searingly forthright political critique as relevant to Thailand as anywhere else in the globalized present. His ghosts are the lingering memories of social injustice that refuse to go away, and the revolts they spring on the system — whether by possessing a vacuum cleaner or staging a full-on home invasion of corrupt government officials — are not just pure cinematic bliss, but the bursts of righteous fury a year like 2025 demanded.
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