The 2025 movie year has come to a close, and there’s a lot of film that came out this year. Superhero cinema was re-energized with the colorful pep of films like Superman and Fantastic Four. Horror had fresh new meat, including a new icon with Aunt Gladys from Weapons. Comedy returned with a long-awaited Naked Gun movie that was at least a laugh a minute. We even got some nice double-dips this year with two films each from directors Richard Linklater, Osgood Perkins, and Stephen Soderbergh. But now that it’s the end of the year, it’s time to sift through the hundreds of movies and pluck out the best. It wasn’t easy, but here they are: my top choices for the 10 movies of 2025.

10. The Long Walk

As far as dystopian stories go, this one gutted me in a way I didn’t expect. The progressive building of the world is beautifully exposed amid a walk to the death, where only a boy can win the prize money and a wish in a broken society. Those who fail to keep pace get a bullet, and every gunshot feels like a lightning bolt to the soul with the anticipation and explosion. The dialogue between the many boys is so rich and engaging that it hurts so hard when the inevitable hammer falls on them. The intensity was so high in this way that I couldn’t look away. There’s a firm thematic focus on the uneven power dynamics of capitalism and a level of violence I never grew used to.

9. It Was Just an Accident

Jafar Panahi’s bitterly tense thriller centering on trauma, revenge, and doubt is furiously gripping. Former Iraqi political prisoner Vahid believes he has found the torturer with a peg leg who ruined his life. The only problem is that he’s not entirely sure he has the right man, forcing him to contact other tortured prisoners to remove all doubt about this identity. The cathartic journey of characters grappling with the chance to kill their torturer is loaded with uncertainty about identity and a deeper questioning of bloody vengeance. A film like this could easily go astray, but Panahi’s real-life experience of being imprisoned by the Iranian government gives it a cerebral edge that extends beyond a debated execution, with the last shot hauntingly perfect.

8. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film be so unnervingly anxiety-inducing that it put me on edge and yet still made me laugh at its audacity. Rose Byrne plays a mother with an absent husband and a daughter on a feeding tube. And everything goes wrong. The roof floods, forcing her into a motel. Her psychiatry job brings unhinged patients. Her co-worker, played by Conan O’Brien, offers her no comfort. Her whole life is a mess of anxiety that becomes so overpowering that she starts hallucinating some means of escape or blame. This is a nerve-wracking psychological horror that, through its grotesque, surreal nature, somehow manages to be funny. A deep, dark, morbid sense of humor, but undoubtedly humorous, even if only for catharsis. I said I’d probably never watch this movie again, but, in all honesty, I’ve still been thinking about this film a lot and how it got under my skin more than any horror film I’ve seen in the past few years. A film that rattles this hard has to make my top 10.

7. Sentimental Value

Director Joachim Trier’s film is a tragically beautiful, quiet, and heartfelt drama about a fractured family trying to understand their history through art. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav, a film-directing father who finds it hard to speak with his grown-up daughter after the death of his ex-wife. Renate Reinsve plays one of the daughters who becomes more honest through her stage acting. Gustav finds a similar route by directing a film about his family’s legacy of suicide, roping in an actress played by Elle Fanning. This is a family with issues that becomes easier to deal with through art, leading to genuinely heartfelt and relatable moments of connection and comfort. The film is stacked with excellent performances and an ease with comedy, as when Stellan Skarsgård gifts the most inappropriate cinephile films for a young boy’s birthday party.

6. Marty Supreme

Once again, Josh Safdie manages to make something like ping pong into an intense motivator for a whirlwind movie that is just as chaotic and even more wildly offbeat than Uncut Gems. Timothee Chalamet may have delivered the performance of his career, melting into the egotistical mind of Marty Mauser, a guy with more ambition for being a ping pong champ than stability for anything else in his life. His running away from doubt, laced with an era-inappropriate soundtrack and furious scenes, makes this film a remarkable portrait of a sweaty loser oozing manufactured bravado in a never-ending quest for unquenchable power. The cast is also stacked with talent that only adds to the chaos, with Gwyneth Paltrow as a washed-up actress seeking sex, Tyler, the Creator, as a taxi driver, and Abel Ferrara as a criminal involved with dog ransom. It has all the fast-paced tornado of trouble that Josh Safdie crafted with Uncut Gems, but made all the more compelling for centering around a guy who is f-ing around, knows full well he won’t reach the find-out phase for a long time.

5. Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro’s love of horror is on full display in this dazzling dream project come to life. His vision of Frankenstein is colorful and layered enough to explore the depths of what it means to live and die. There’s a wondrously dark approach in Victor Frankenstein’s lust for defeating death and his creation’s longing for that inevitable trait of being human. The production design is magnificent, the writing poetic, and the horror willing to be grotesque amid the decadent, where the theatrical score works well for scenes of sawing through bone. The final result is one of the most intoxicating adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel and a masterpiece of del Toro’s filmography.

4. Sinners

Sinners is far more than Ryan Coogler’s Americana riff on From Dusk Till Dawn. It embodies a greater sensation of greed, faith, and community than the number of ways a vampire can be killed. I love all the characters in this period setting. Michael B. Jordan effortlessly plays two conspiring brothers with a lust for money and sex. Miles Caton is a real treat as a guitar-playing prodigy conflicted with desire. Jack O’Connell is sinisterly manipulative in how he brings others into his vampire fold, which takes over the culture. Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jayme Lawson are all incredibly sexy and dominate their roles. And then there’s Delroy Lindo, who is just devouring every moment he has on screen as a hard-drinking, hard-playing musician. So much time is spent building a lyrical portrait of the internal struggles of the Southern setting that, when the supernatural monsters arrive, it’s like a genre stew coming to the perfect boil. It’s not every day you see period piece horror with musical segments ranging from stomping blues to Irish jigs.

3. One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson goes full Pynchon in this rebellious and ridiculous tale of revolution and the chaos that comes with what seems like a never-ending war. It’s the type of film that can feature Leonardo DiCaprio as a burnt-out rebel and Benicio del Toro as a quirky sensei, so accustomed to immigration chaos that he can have a beer between his escape plans. Add in a viciously sexy rebel played by Teyana Taylor, a racist colonel played up with tongue-in-cheek absurdity by Sean Penn, an intense display of youthful rage from Chase Infiniti, and you have a film that is incredibly thrilling, always stylish, and unapologetically blunt in its perfectly poignant nature that hits every offbeat note with confident force. I did not expect a film this bold to be shown in IMAX, but there it was. A provocative and punchy picture that was not only reflective of the era but vicious about the need to attack and keep up the fight.

2. The Secret Agent

An unbelievably alive and unpredictable tale of how messy it can be to maneuver through a web of fascism and untangle it afterward. The direction by Kleber Mendonça Filho (who previously directed the wonderfully bonkers Bacurau) is anything but routine, as he takes this escape tale from 1970s authoritarian Brazil into the realm of the tense and even the absurd, throwing sharks and amputated legs into the mix, briefly turning into a B-movie for one scene. Wagner Moura’s performance is stellar as the targeted Armando, trying to avoid being imprisoned or assassinated by the government that has succeeded in murdering his wife. He always seems to have this look of anger and sadness as he walks a fine line of laying low and trying to slip away with his son. It’s a movie that is punchingly poetic in how it finds just the right notes for a thriller about an authoritarian state, daring to strike some juxtapositions in soundtrack and tone that surprisingly work.

1. Resurrection

Bi Gan has crafted a masterful depiction of dreams and desires that no other film has captured with such mesmerizing beauty and humanistic allure. Set in a dismal future where people have sacrificed dreams for longevity, one dreamer is granted a final dose of fulfillment through experiencing all life through a cinematic anthology of the many sensations that make us human. Through its many stories of different tones, genres, and shooting styles, a wondrous sensation slowly enraptured me as it unfolded with so many fantastic shots and clever effects that always transfix and never get lost in the all-encompassing stories that cover conversations with spirits and singing vampires. Bi Gan swung for the fences with a film this ambitious, and this is certainly not going to be everybody’s jam, but it absolutely was my kind of movie. Resurrection zoomed straight up my list for featuring one of the most reflective and haunting endings that took me straight out of my body, questioning mortality and existence. It might sound corny to describe such an experience as transcendent, but I can’t lie, that’s really what it felt like. It has that same feeling I’ve had when I leave a theater and feel as though I’d left this planet for a few hours. It’s beautiful, thoughtful, and never bores for trying to cover so much ground about existence and dreams while still leaving plenty of mystery and wonder. Films don’t get more spiritually and philosophically meaty than this.

Honorable Mention

–Weapons: A cleverly woven horror mystery told from different perspectives and with the most iconic horror character of the year, Aunt Gladys.

–Black Bag: Stephen Soderbergh’s super smart and super sexy spy thriller with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett being absolutely electrifying on screen.

–Friendship: Tim Robinson perfectly portrays the dark absurdities of men struggling to make connections and feel adequate, in a way that is equal parts sympathetic and silly.

–Wake Up Dead Man: The most dramatic and thoughtful of the Knives Out mystery movies and proof that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig can take Detective Blanc into many more stories beyond mere satire.

–Broken Rage: Takeshi Kitano can still craft gritty and goofy films with his highly experimental film about a hitman, told in two different tones.

–The Voice of Hind Rajab: A gut-wrenching recreation of the tragic death of a little girl in Gaza and the failure to rescue her, letting the real-life recordings tell her story.

–The Shrouds: David Cronenberg’s body-horror approach to grief works so well for the layered, frightening, and erotic tension placed on the conspiracy surrounding a high-tech cemetery.

–The Naked Gun: It’s just funny. It takes the same mile-a-minute joke delivery of the original films and beefs them up with modern tropes and a perfectly tongue-in-cheek performance by Liam Neeson.

–Superman: I love me some Superman comics, and James Gunn delivered one of the best movie versions of the character since the Richard Donner original.