The 10 Best Movies of 2025

People are saying 2025 was a very good year for movies, and we’d agree. In terms of artistic quality — if not domestic box office, which will finish about half a billion dollars down from last year — this year gave audiences a varied bounty of films built on strong concepts, mesmerizing performances, and compelling visions of our hectic modern times.

If these cinematic gems share any quality, it’s a certain relentlessness that also characterizes life right now. We might have seen in 2025 a good share of quiet, contemplative dramas like The History of Sound and Train Dreams, but the films that dominate this Top Ten tend to reflect the present mood of profound disquiet.

That thread also runs through the ten films that just missed this list, almost any one of which could have landed in the Top Ten, because this was such a good year.

10. Warfare

Directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza leave not one second of slack in this nail-biting combat thriller, based on Mendoza’s experiences and “told through the memories” of his platoon of Navy SEALS, sent on a desperate extraction mission in Iraq, in 2006. Portrayed by a sharp-shooting crew of up-and-coming talent, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, and Kit Connor, these young soldiers face death and disembowelment fighting real enemy combatants, allowed no time amidst the chaos to consider politics or the power plays of self-interested leaders. Brothers and bullets are all they have time for if they’re going to make it out in one piece.

9. Twinless

Audiences can anticipate a big twist in actor-writer-director James Sweeney’s proudly strange dramedy, but, well beyond expectations, that twist is a gift that keeps on giving. The film is also full of pleasant surprises beyond plot twists, chief among them Dylan O’Brien’s lead turn in the dual roles of twin brothers Rocky and Roman. One twin’s sudden death leads the other, suffering deeply, to a support group for twins who have lost their other half, launching the season’s most moving depiction of loss and an offbeat love story that’s, yes, full of twists and turns.

8. Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos continues his commitment to fish-eyed visions of extravagant madness starring Emma Stone, casting his Oscar-winning muse in this witty remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!. Stone is a stone-faced marvel as a pharma CEO kidnapped by a disturbed duo who believe she’s one of the aliens controlling life on our planet. Portrayed by Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons, in a brave performance of someone removed from reality, these bumbling conspiracy theorists should be no match for Stone’s high-powered high achiever, but their clash of wits and other weapons evolves into a fascinating standoff, and thrilling finale laced with both shocking violence and laugh-out-loud humor.

7. It Was Just an Accident

This compact thriller by personally embattled Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi earned the highest prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival for its gripping narrative of pain and retribution. Taut editing and cinematography keep the film keyed in on its dynamic ensemble, led by Vahid Mobasseri as auto mechanic Vahid, who believes that the unassuming-looking father who just pulled into his shop is the same man who was his torturer inside an Iraqi prison. Vahid acts impulsively to exact revenge, but then questions whether he has the right man, as the film ponders what to do with a war criminal who was “just following orders.”

6. Weapons

Zach Cregger’s moody, mischievous Weapons, much like his previous film Barbarian, burrows into deep, dark crevices of humanity and just keeps digging until it gets to the darkest parts, yet somehow still has us laughing along to the macabre goings-on surrounding a classroom of missing children, the ensuing community witchhunt, and a genuine houseguest from hell, otherwise known as Aunt Gladys, the clown-faced weirdo portrayed so indelibly by Amy Madigan we might actually see an actor take home an Oscar for horror, for a change.

5. The Perfect Neighbor

Told almost entirely through police body cam footage of officer calls to a working-class Florida neighborhood constantly disrupted by disputes caused by or concerning one nasty new neighbor, Geeta Gandbhir’s true-crime documentary is riveting and infuriating in equal measure, ultimately offering a moving and poignant look at a community of mostly Black and Latino families who had co-existed peacefully until one woman made it her mission to destroy that peace. A life was lost, stolen, yet, admirably, the film doesn’t dismiss this imperfect neighbor’s perspective, while also clearly prosecuting a case against her.

4. Sirât

In one swift, jaw-dropping moment, this visually transporting Spanish road movie drama from French filmmaker Oliver Laxe, and producers Pedro Almodóvar and Agustín Almodóvar, turns a corner, going from rambling missing-person adventure to an unforgettable existential journey through the Moroccan desert, where dad Luis (Sergi López), with pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) in tow, desperately searches a rave for his missing daughter. Encountering a quirky assortment of partiers who only want to get lost, Luis will be lucky to find what he’s looking for, or even to emerge from the desert alive.

3. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Rose Byrne gives the film performance of the year in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s lacerating comedy of errors, playing Linda, the mother of an extremely trying child, going through an extremely trying period, and carrying her burdens not with poise but pulsating with rage. Bouncing off the film’s eccentric ensemble, including Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky, and an offscreen Christian Slater, Byrne’s Linda earns our sympathies, while still constantly fucking up, ever-ready to collapse into a million pieces on the spot, or smash someone else’s head in because her life is tough and no one’s helping. If “No one is coming to save you” was one of the leading mantras of this crazy year, then Linda is a patron saint.

2. Sinners

Filmmaker Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan cemented their place among the ranks of director-actor pairings that’ll go down in cinema history with their fifth collaboration — a blues-inflected, Depression-era musical horror story so steeped in culture, history, beauty, and texture that we could parse its politics and racial and social commentary for days, examine every facet of its amalgamation of folk lore, African and African-American spirituality, old South legends, and vampire tales, and deconstruct its centerpiece scene of musical eras living and breathing in unison. Or, like audiences did to the tune of nearly $280 million at the box office, we can simply enjoy the gorgeous range of Coogler’s amazing cast, the winning period design and gut-busting blues, and sop up this Southern Gothic like gravy.

1. One Battle After Another

Jonny Greenwood’s propulsive, piano-laced score takes off even before the first frame of Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful epic adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland drops us into a daring revolutionary raid on a migrant detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border. The film practically never lets up from there, a whole lotta movie sprawling across sixteen years and half a dozen main characters playing in the landmine-strewn sandbox that is this divided country. Deftly encapsulating our zeitgeist of loud, angry discord in a tender and comical tale of Leo DiCaprio’s endearing single dad and Chase Infiniti’s innocent daughter caught up in a hair-raising, expertly edited race against evil, Anderson’s opus vividly captures the spirit of resistance that sustains revolutionaries, and nations, through the worst of times.

Plus, ten more that also made their mark:

• The Librarians
• Lurker
• Marty Supreme
• Misericordia
• No Other Choice
• One of Them Days
• Plainclothes
• Sentimental Value
• Train Dreams
• 28 Years Later

Zach Schonfeld’s 10 Best Films of 2025

1. One Battle After Another

2. Bugonia

3. Weapons

4. The Secret Agent

5. It Was Just an Accident

6. Sinners

7. Sentimental Value

8. The Mastermind

9. Sly Lives!

10. Sorry, Baby

Read André Hereford and Zach Schonfeld’s reviews in Metro Weekly magazine. Subscribe for free at www.metroweekly.com/subscribe.

Follow André on X at @here4andre. Follow Zach on X at @zzzzaaaacccchhh.