Favorite Films of 2025

“I think that among the arts, cinema is the least known. Its history is generally ignored, and so is, above all, its real nature. As cinema is the most secret of all artistic languages, it is also the least understood.” - Víctor Erice, ‘Writing Cinema, Thinking Cinema’ (1998)

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express. - Pope Leo XIV

This past year I thought a lot about something Martin Scorsese said nearly a decade ago when asked why he wasn’t seeing a lot of new films: “There’s over saturation. Particularly in our world as it is now and nothing really does have a meaning. Images for example are everywhere. Cinema used to be in a building and even on television, you’d see a film or whatever. I must say a lot of the films that I’m aware of… and I don’t see that many new ones over the past two or three years. I stopped because the images don’t mean anything. We’re just completely saturated with images that don’t mean anything. Words certainly don’t mean anything anymore, they’re twisted and turned. So where’s the meaning? Where’s the truth? So we have to strip away everything. It goes back to that question I had in ‘Mean Streets,’ how do you live a good life? A life which is good, meaning compassion, and respect for others, in a world like today or in a world where I grew up, quite honestly.” 

Scorsese’s words, in our overworked and over-convenienced lives of the 2020s, have only escalated beyond anything we could have imagined in 2016. Images dominate almost every facet of our lives, both synthetic and authentic, disorienting us into an unclear sense of reality. The opening intertitle of Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis, predicted our conundrum: “The year is 2026, a Dickensian ‘best of times, worst of times,’ where total oppression and manipulation of the masses is wielded by the unquestionable power of the few.” Hollywood is just one of the many industries beholden to the powers and narrow-minded whims of the few, at the expense of artists and people who dare to demand more from their entertainment beyond the banal mill of “content.” Before Paramount won the bid for Warner Bros-Discovery, Netflix’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos offered up YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram as worthy competitors in their justification for acquisition of WBD to regulators. This logic was telling. Sarandos, and “the unquestionable power of the few,” continue to render the image meaningless. Come home from work, get comfortable, turn on Netflix while scrolling endlessly on your phone. Missed something on the TV? Don’t worry, a character will provide much needed exposition in just a few short minutes. Fatuous social media content, nonsensical AI slop, vacuous images, and cinema… it’s all the same to Sarandos; therefore, it should be for you too. 

Paramount’s David Ellison, who is now actually merging the storied Warner Bros-Discovery (thanks to Republicans in the Senate and an autocratic president who desires state run media) into his own recently acquired, and also storied, studio, claims to be friendlier to the moving image. Don’t be mistaken, this is just as worse of an infernal path, if not more evil, than the Netflix alternative. We’ll see how it goes. But thousands of layoffs and less work for film creators is usually not good for the moving image, because then there will be less movies and even less theaters to exhibit them. What Ellison does with Turner Class Movies will also be revealing. TCM is the definitive channel of film history - curating, contextualizing, and preserving cinema every day. As David Zaslav knows, anyone who tries to do away with this cultural gem is public enemy number one of Hollywood. Instead of, say, number 3 or 4.

Cinema, it seems, has always been the most trivialized art form. Deemed lowbrow at its inception, the seventh art never seemed to recover from its popularly perceived role as strictly entertainment and escapism. That is in no small part thanks to Hollywood, though the industry used to have moguls and executives that knew and cared about movies. Plenty great movies of artistic merit - thanks to many producers, artisans and filmmakers of the studio system - slipped through and still awe us today. Now, cinema is thrown in, by imbecilic CEOs, with the rest of the content. Casablanca is now valued IP - what’s the best way to optimize and streamline this black-and-white masterpiece? Maybe sleek it up with some genAI, or colorize it? It makes sense how we got to this point, but it doesn’t make it any less disconcerting.

We need to continue to understand and espouse the fact that cinema is more than a meaningless distraction and is also one of the most humane art forms. The visual art of cinema has power, moving images with force can not only invoke feeling but enact change, thinking, and resistance. And at this point, when art is increasingly degraded and trivialized while this country is run by the most barbaric, unintelligent, anti-intellectual, war-hawking imperial grifters, then the act of engaging with art or making it, whether it be literature, painting, filmmaking, opera or ballet, is itself an act of resistance. 

Theaters are, and god willing will continue to be, one of the last few places where the use of your phone is, de facto at least, prohibited. To be at the mercy of art, to be challenged, to resist basic, pernicious, and enervating comforts is the point. To be at the whims of an artist, instead of having your worldview reassured and pleasures fancied by vacant images, “content,” and AI sheen regurgitated from better, human works, is the point. Part of the reason we’re losing the point is because this content and AI garbage has possibly, and unfortunately, revealed what we actually desired all along. To be passive consumers rotting in an indeterminate void of automation and algorithm - depersonalized, docile, and unsexed. And yet, despite all of this, meaningful images are still being made and finding their way to those who seek their nourishment. Hollywood is in crisis, as it has been for most of its existence. This one seems different though. Cinema, meanwhile, is still chugging along, somehow. Its cultural stronghold may be diminishing, but that may not be a bad thing for the art form in the long run. Because those of us who wish to resist, to maintain our humanity, and seek beauty, will continue to make potent images as well as observe them with open and free minds. 

The list below of my favorite films of 2025 is a set mostly of films whose import rides on the act of resistance, through form or narrative, whether politically or simply from the powers of the few by being works that critique, defy, and inspire.

1. Happyend (Neo Sora)

I can excuse Neo Sora’s superficial analog with our turbulent times for the methods in which he emphasizes the humanity of the film’s characters amidst encroaching surveillance and authoritarianism. It also works tonally as a film that displays our current age simply as it is, shunning any overwhelming sense of either anger or hope. It’s a beautiful, melancholy film that pushes us to see the humane no matter how dystopian, how amoral, and how fascistic everything becomes. I’ll never stop thinking about the shot of the tree under the train and tunnels. A straightforward, lingering shot that touched me immensely and took my breath away. The film reminds me to keep the pursuit of beauty alive, for color, for joy, for something that stands both apart and against the flatness and sterility, the concrete and cruelty. Stasis and movement, stasis and movement. It never ends. Please let it end.

2. Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath)

Essential and breathtaking. Simultaneously articulates that feeling of losing a seemingly  better world where a future was at least possible and mourns the ideal world we never actually had. All through the prism of Henry Fonda’s life and work. An icon that represented what the U.S. could have been and a paragon of quixotic virtues and values that at one brief time, at the very least, were a light in a long tunnel. As an essay film, it is all over the place (should’ve gone further with its Marxist critique). But so is the world we live in now; structureless on a foundation that once had solid, enduring soil underneath it. Its subsidence now is all too irremediable, too broken, too flooded, and empty of both style and substance.

3. Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze)

Somnambulant cinema and even better because the screen already resembles the shining, blurry lines between sleep and wakefulness. I felt as if I was napping deeply in a sunlit, breezy meadow as I watched this. So comforting in both its natural soundscape and landscape scenes where the images are residual in their aching grasp for clarity. They pulse both for life and with it, kind of like people do today, searching for beauty to make the heart burst, only for it to be numbed from bearing witness to more and more brutality and senseless information. Clarity is not found in these antique digital images (shot with a low-resolution Sony Ericsson W95 cell phone) yet they still find and make meaning as a rebuttal to our world that demands knowingness out of images without meaning.

4. Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) 

If Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) predicted the misery of the digital age then Cloud confirms it along with the additional absurdity of it all. Kurosawa’s pitch black humor reveals the stupidity of the internet’s pervasiveness in all facets of our lives, a reality forged by pettiness, anger, and desire for retribution on someone, anything. And sometimes for shitty products made popular for the internet. But the worst part of it is the gamification of our current reality spurred by capitalism’s entanglement with the internet’s insistence on a this or that. Nothing in between. The dream house is a warehouse; only clean up your trash on the street, not in your apartment; finally have some fun - feel something, that is - with real life gunplay and when your life is at risk. Cry when a loved one is murdered in front of your eyes, yet still sink in your sin. Act like a ratel and lose all your mammalian instinct. Make money at the expense of your humanity, sell your soul to a digital Hell. Those in power will handle the rest. Kurosawa may be the artist of the 21st-century, the greatest chronicler of the tech-saturated artifice of our existence.

5. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jafar Panahi’s first film after being released from prison in Iran, It Was Just an Accident is a formally precise and straightforward work. A film that insists on its very existence as political resistance. Like the censorship of the Production Code during the classical Hollywood era, the secret and limited act of making a film under a brutal authoritarian regime endows Panahi with a less-is-more approach. Wide shots, pans, and clever (also humorous at times) cuts deftly follow its characters and their many moments of hand-wringing and tension. The film is at its most potent, however, during the climax, when the camera simply doesn’t move. Instead, we watch one character follow the others as they pace around him, again debating revenge and, in turn, his fate.

 At any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern;  that we - I mean all human beings - are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. “Hamlet” or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

• Virginia Woolf

6. The Secret Agent (Kleber Mondanca Filho)

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film belies its title with a colorful and brilliant rumination on the lives of dissenters within and beyond Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. The wonderful Wagner Moura plays the central character, a former professor turned political refugee. Part thriller, part urban legend, and part - with cinema playing another important role - moving-image-album of memories.

7. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

Reichardt’s signature lulling style works to deconstruct the selfish, masculine urge for something greater, revealing the wilful blindness that goes with it - to the suffering of those around you, the political state of the world, and even your own existential necessities. Josh O’ Connor renders his protagonist with scumbag charm. Like the previous film on this list, The Secret Agent, The Mastermind revels in a leisurely pace of subtlety and allusion until gradually revealing itself in cleverly composed moments, awakening us to its calamities through cinematic blessings.

8. Relay (David Mackenzie)

I was really struck by David Mackenzie’s throwback, Hitchockian thriller starring Riz Ahmed and Lily James. James in particular gives an invigorating performance and without it, the film’s twist would not work. Few performances in my entire life have moved me like this one does. It’s easy to be wooed and swayed by her as Ahmed is as she exploits his loneliness and desperation to protect her. This film was quietly released into theaters last summer and that is a shame. Not only is it fun, it has plenty of brains.

9. Eephus (Carson Lund)

Carson Lund’s languorous ode to the game of baseball is the best movie about the sport since Moneyball (2011). The film captures one last game on the sandlot between two groups of listless adult men where an elementary school is soon to be built. They prolong the game well into nighttime, using car headlights to keep it going, never wanting it to end. It’s an immensely funny and moving piece about the most cinematic game there is. It’s also an homage to the spectatorship of the game, the beauty of its slow, stop-and-go pace, demanding your attention while also giving you permission to converse with your companions or go buy a hot dog. An effective fuck you to the pitch clock and the need to speed things up. The Pope’s words from the quote above, “defend slowness where possible,” could just as well be applied to the great sport of baseball. The joy of viewing a baseball game is the hanging out part of it. Why must it be sped up? I kept thinking of Sam Raimi’s baseball film, For the Love of the Game (1999), starring Kevin Costner. Costner plays a pitcher who strolls back to the mound, repeating the phrase “clear the mechanism” in his head in order to tune out the crowd and stadium noise to focus on the next pitch. Nowadays, pitchers can probably say half of that phrase before they have to get back to the rubber and throw to home plate. Like the capitalist, corporate wasteland we currently inhabit, all reflective, cerebral acts shunned for efficiency and streamlining.

10. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

A true generational work from Ryan Coogler. Possibly a last gasp of smart mainstream filmmaking. Confronts history and the complexities of its racial entanglements with horrific aplomb. I’ll never forget the ecstatic chills I had seeing that foundational, staggering musical centerpiece in 70mm IMAX.

There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.

• Hannah Arendt

11. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Another great crowdpleaser of the year and yet another great film from Paul Thomas Anderson. Leonardo DiCaprio proves once again that he is one of our greatest actors, especially in comedic roles like this one. This film is less a revolutionary calling card than it is a father-daughter action-adventure flick but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.

12. A Poet (Simon Mesa Soto)

This film about a failed poet unfortunately slid under the radar. It is at once a hilarious and deeply moving story about a writer in Medellin, Colombia desperate to make great art finding promise in the poetic gifts of a young student he decides to mentor. Living vicariously through her success, things really begin to unravel. Another film with brilliant touches of editing, hard cuts to induce laughter.

13. Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)

Another memory piece about the ghosts that haunt our homes, former lives whose macabre rituals or desperate traditions still linger in the succeeding generations. A film that uses its allusions to certain political turmoils effectively, focusing on the people who suffered from the guilt, abuse, and disillusionment of their time.

14. Urchin (Harris Dickinson)

This knockout debut from Harris Dickinson was the biggest surprise of the year for me. Perhaps the fact that it was a debut from a major actor that this didn’t turn up on more year-end-best lists. Here it is on mine. A must watch.

15. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)

Eva Victor’s film is a lovely, and at times dark, bit of subversion of the Sundance coming-of-age picture. A tightly controlled structure of tone and character with Victor’s central performance anchors the film while a small role from John Carroll Lynch cements its excellence.

Who speaks of the future?

Who counts

in saying:

“It shall be”?

Look outward

and you see within:

It is. 

• Jean Gebser

16. Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)

“That’s the beauty of art, isn’t it? It Waits for us.” It also outlives us. Linklater’s best film from last year (Nouvelle Vague grew on me, but not enough to make it here) is a spectacular talkfest biopic about lyricist Lorenz Hart on the night of his former partner’s - composer Richard Rodgers - first showing of his hit musical Oklahoma! in 1943. Though formally uninteresting, Ethan Hawk’s performance as Hart makes up for almost all of it.

17. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

A distressing and brutal experience. Haven’t been this uncomfortable watching a film in awhile. Gave me a headache. Way better than that other film involving Bronstein and starring Timothee Chalamet.

18. The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence)

Another film that people seemed too eager to move on from. This is a solid Stephen King adaptation and everything here is really well constructed and, with the exception of Mark Hamill, nicely performed. And despite its seemingly empty YA aesthetic, the film, to its credit, doesn’t hold back on the shocking violence. Not great by any measure, but certainly a timely, worthy watch.

19. The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)

A brutally tense and aggravating film about the Red Crescent’s attempt to rescue six-year old Hind Rajab, a Palestinian girl trapped in Gaza and then murdered by Israeli Defense Forces along with the ambulance drivers dispatched to save her. We never see her or the killing, only hearing her voice pleading with the Red Crescent workers to come get her, doing everything they can amidst bureaucratic obstacles.

20. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Joachim Trier’s most restrained film is another delightful drama about familial relationships and the power of art to help mend those relationships. While I preferred the stylistic flourishes of his last film, The Worst Person in the World, this one is just as poignant.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people are so full of doubts.

• Bertrand Russell

Honorable Mentions:

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)

The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)

All That’s Left of You (Cherien Dabis)

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

Bring Them Down (Christopher Andrews)

Roofman (Derek Cianfrance)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Predators (David Osit)

To go forth now

from all the entanglement

that is ours and yet not ours,

that, like the water in an old well,

reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.

From all that clings like burrs and brambles—

to go forth

and see for once, close up, afresh,

what we had ceased to see—

so familiar it had become.

To glimpse how vast and how impersonal

is the suffering that filled your childhood.

Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.

Go forth to what? To uncertainty,

to a country with no connections to us

and indifferent to the dramas of our life.

What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,

a dark need, the incapacity to understand.

To bow to all this.

To let go—

even if you have to die alone.

Is this the start of a new life?

• Rainer Maria Rilke

Ballet, Edgar Degas, 1876-77

Costume Design, Florine Stettheimer, 1912

Composition with Red Circle, Rudolf Bauer, 1930