The 14 Best Movies of 2025

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We're finally at the end of all the list-making! (At least until the end of this year.) At the start of every year I go through the release calendar and usually saw some derivative of the same thing: Huh, this year doesn't look like much. But many critics have argued, and I'm inclined to agree, that this year was one of the best for movies. There were several strong, inventive and unique original features that stood out in the morass of corporately created nostalgia sequels. The documentary scene felt incredibly powerful this year, a balm considering our current timeline where facts and history are under attack. Movies felt fun and fresh, with several iconic filmmakers making movies that would only continue to illustrate their grandiosity.

So here are our picks for the best movies of 2025! Be sure to drop yours in the comments!

The Librarians

It's simultaneously amazing and ridiculous that The Librarians, one of the best documentaries I saw out of the festival circuit this year, hasn't received a wider distribution and is still doing smaller screenings. This was one of the most potent and timeliest docs I watched. The story of a group of librarians struggling to keep books on the shelves in spite of widespread bans and critiques of what kids are reading hit me in my bones. I love the library and, at one point, dreamed of being a librarian, and to watch them beat against personal attacks and try to foster a love of reading in children (which is not going in a great direction this days).... This is an imperative watch. You can read my full review here. -Kristen Lopez

Sinners

On paper, Sinners shouldn’t work. A historical film centered around twin brothers who start a juke joint that gets overrun by vampires? But it's many things at once. It’s an insightful commentary about both race and religion. A cool supernatural horror yarn. A love letter to the blues. All these elements combine into a film that not only works but is one of the most original, and frankly, badass films of our era.

Ryan Coogler weaves a tale that drips coolness. Between its twin protagonists drenched in mob regalia, to a host of interesting characters that feel rich with detail, to a vampire antagonist with a stunner of an egalitarian pitch, it’s unerringly clever, bold, and vibrant. That doesn’t even touch the film’s cavalcade of cool scenes, most pointedly its aspect ratio-changing centerpiece song (the best single scene this year). In an era where many films start to read monotonously identical, Sinners feels like the astounding Parasite-esque picture that we’re lucky to see because there won’t be another like it for quite some time. -Jeff Ewing

One Battle After Another

As I've told others, I'm not big on Paul Thomas Anderson. But this year he got me with his pitch-perfect adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, One Battle After Another. By far Anderson's most political movie, the film is a pointed critique on fascism, and how one man is forced to push aside the action of being a revolutionary for the quiet passivity of raising the next generation. Everyone in the movie is cast beautifully. It's a film where every time I watch it I notice something new about it. Leonardo DiCaprio has never been better. This is a chef's kiss film. -KL

Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag was one of the funnest times I've had in the movies (alongside watching Sinners and Relay)! As I said when I reviewed it: Much like Soderbergh’s 2013 thriller Side Effects — also brilliant — Black Bag finds the seduction that comes from lying...This isn’t a story about a man trying to find out if his wife committed crimes. It’s how he’s going to find a way to reconcile with his own conscience to get her out. Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, and Marisa Abela (who was one of my favorite side characters this year) do stellar work. It's pure Soderbergh pop. It's slick, it moves, and it's sexy as hell. -KL

Hamnet

Shakespeare is no stranger to cinema. Aside from the adaptations of the Bard’s works, there have been plenty of representations of the writer in film and TV. Where Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet stands apart from other Shakespearean period pieces is in its big decision to make the author tangential rather than central. Specifically, the film posits an interesting theory: what if one of the most profound losses of Shakespeare’s (Paul Mescal) life, the death of his young son Hamnet, influenced one of his most beloved plays, Hamlet?

Art is often an outlet for human emotion, but grief is especially potent when channeled through an artist’s chosen medium. We watch as the spectre of grief floats around Agnes and her family, delivering a heaviness that permeates every frame. The performances here keep Hamnet away from the trap of being simply maudlin. Jessie Buckley, in particular, delivers a forceful performance as Agnes, showing her transformation from a willful, fiercely independent woman into a woman who loves fiercely and therefore grieves deeply. Her grief spills over in the film’s staggering final moments and motivates her to make one of the most poignant gestures of the movie. Performances like this, paired with Zhao’s beautifully simple direction, help make Hamnet an emotional tour de force. -Alejandra Martinez

One to One: John and Yoko

I'm a sucker for a music doc and this was one of two that stayed in my brain for months on end. I seriously contemplated writing a far longer piece about the way art responds to turbulent times but didn't. Honestly, this would make a fantastic double feature with Chloe Zhao's Hamnet in terms of how personal feelings can be used in art.

Centered on the One to One charity performance involving John Lennon, Kevin McDonald's doc illustrates not just the personal attacks Lennon and Yoko Ono were subject to, but how they continued to press against the horrors of the era regardless. This is a movie about why we need music, why we need culture, in order to survive what's going on around us. It's an utterly brilliant movie about how we can get through what's going on right now, and how Lennon and Ono were doing something similar in the '70s. -KL

Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos has a knack for unusual stories. The Lobster is a batshit black comedy fantasy about a world where you find love or become an animal. The Killing of a Sacred Deer a brilliant absurdist horror thriller that approaches the cosmic variety, while Poor Things is a wild, breezy, horny riff on a Frankenstein-esque folktale.

Bugonia is, at face value, more accessible as a darkly comedic story of a Big Pharma CEO who gets kidnapped by a down-on-his-luck man who swears she’s an alien from Alpha Centauri. It's routinely tense, punctuated by subtle comedic bits that all build towards the most shocking endings of any film in 2025, as stunning as the ride is enjoyable (which, in both cases, is a lot). -JE

It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley

I was a Jeff Buckley fa before I watched Amy Berg's documentary on the singer. But after I saw it, I became a super fan. Berg's rollicking examination of the singer, who died at the age of just thirty years old is masterly at conveying a time and a place. The way music hit different in the '90s, and how people came to discover Buckley is fascinating. But what makes the doc even more special is the focus on Buckley himself, seen in recorded footage. His voice is a constant, not just in the music he sings but in the endless voice messages he'd leave on friends' answering machines. The hypnotic quality of him just talking nonsense is fantastic. He was a storyteller even when he wasn't weaving beautiful lyrics. It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley is a remarkable tribute to music, to artistry, and to a beautiful soul taken far too soon. -KL

Eternity

The relative death of the rom-com has been a notable trend, at least until a growing array of great ones like Rye Lane, The Big Sick, and Palm Springs threatened to bring the genre back from an early grave. Eternity is yet another rom-com that finds brilliance in an unconventional, but beautifully intuitive, tale. An old husband and wife (Larry and Joan) pass away in a world where every soul gets one week to choose its eternity, soulmate included… but then Joan meets her first husband, Luke, whose life was tragically cut short by war.

What follows is endlessly creative and charming, as the relationships threatens to extend forever amidst a host of hilarious afterlives. The love triangle itself is a clever reconstruction of a time-honored crisis, while Miles Teller (Larry), Elizabeth Olsen (Joan), and Callum Turner (Luke) all put in top-notch work. Olsen brings charisma and heartbreaking pathos, while the narrative itself has an absurd amount of sincerity and heart beneath the clever worldbuilding. It’s the best, most intelligent, and funnest rom-com since Palm Springs, possibly of the decade or beyond, and a ton of fun. -JE

She Rides Shotgun

It breaks my heart that She Rides Shotgun came and went back in August. Everyone who's watched it on my recommendation has asked me the same thing: "Why wasn't this a bigger movie?" This wasn't only one of the best movies of the year, it also contained my best needle drop of the year. The story of a little girl on the run with her father is intense, anchored by breathtaking performances by Taron Egerton (continuing to fly under the radar as one of our best actors) and newcomer Ana Sophia Heger. It's an old-school, noirish, Western drama we don't make anymore and if this is the only one we see than I'm happy for its existence. -KL

Marty Supreme

In films like Good Time and Uncut Gems, brothers Josh and Benny Safdie have proven their knack for creating enjoyable films following protagonists that can’t get a single effing break. Now that the duo have split off to direct solo features, Josh Safdie’s brilliant Marty Supreme keeps the torch burning. The film is a stellar story of a 1950s ping-pong obsessive whose ego-driven path makes enemies, causes frustration, and forces Marty to grow up. Timothee Chalamet delivers his best role since Call Me By Your Name, fully transforming into the unabrowed hopeful phenomenon. It’s a stellar role, and though the film’s a bit long, the script is both enjoyably tense and regularly funny throughout. It helps that Marty is a quippy jackass–in an interview he calls himself “Hitler’s worst nightmare”–and the film is arguably a vampire film thanks to Milton Rockwell’s straightfaced claim that he is one (from 1601, no less). -JE

Hedda

There doesn't feel like a movie I wrote or talked about more than Nia DaCosta's Hedda, a phenomenal adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. As I said in my original review: ...Nia DaCosta who gives us a Hedda that feels perfectly suited for 2025 despite her adaptation taking place in a vaguely 1930s-esque time period. With Tessa Thompson in fine form as the title character, this adaptation of Hedda Gabler makes some big changes but feels fresh, frightening, and dominating in all the best ways! I stand by that statement. It's sexy, it's sumptuous, beautiful and witty. DaCosta and Thompson should continue to make all their movies together. -KL

Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro has commented more than once that Frankenstein is the movie he was born to make. The story that inspired his lifelong love of, and curiosity about, monsters. It’s a fantastic film, ensconced in the immaculate Gothic vibes that del Toro gravitates towards. The film follows two sides of a tale narrated to Lars Mikkelsen’s Captain Anderson. First, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who tells of his obsessive creation of the Creature (Jacob Elordi) from the corpses of war victims.

The second half is the Creature’s own narration, telling how he came to make friends, become literate, discover his origin, found love, and decided to hunt Victor Frankenstein until the ends of the Earth. It’s a beautiful, intellectually complex and immaculately produced horror vision, grounded in a parallel between fathers/sons and creators/creation. Most centrally, del Toro’s empathetic pen crafted a stellar script that allows Jacob Elordi to give the best performance of his career so far as a complex Creature. To play the best version of a character that’s also been played by the esteemed icons Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, and Robert De Niro is no small feat, cementing Frankenstein as one for the ages. -JE

Pillion

Other critics organizations considered Harry Lighton's queer biker romance for 2025 and I am to! This is one to keep your eyes open for when it drops in February. Lighton's story follows the meek Colin (Harry Melling) as he embarks on a dominant/submissive relationship with biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgard). Like Sinners, which made many people question where sex fits in American filmmaking, Lighton's story is unrepentantly explicit and sexy in how it presents Ray and Colin's relationship. No doubt the pearl clutchers will lose it over this. But at its heart it's the story of two people, one of whom is desperate for connection, and how to navigate a relationship that no longer serves you. It's a movie that hit me like a ton of bricks and I just want to feel it again. -KL

Thank you to Alejandra Martinez for contributing to this list.