Here we are at our halftime report for the cinema year of 2025. Insert platitudes about how fast the year is sliding by, and maybe a joke about the heat here.

I am struck by how many good movies that I’ve already seen this year, and by how many were aimed at mainstream-minded audiences. Tired of every well-received movie being a niche what’s-it that you haven’t heard of? Tired of nearly every pop movie being unwatchable?

Some filmmakers have your back this year.

These are the movies so far in 2025 that have given me the most pleasure, unranked, in the order that I first encountered them, with notes on how they can be seen.

“Eephus” (Carson Lund)

Co-writer and director Carson Lund, in his feature debut, fashions what may one day go down as one of the classic American baseball movies. Two middle-aged, adult league teams play a final game on a field that’s about to be razed, conjuring all sorts of notions of the cat being in the cradle, which is to say the film captures the intensity and the fleetingness of powerful and minute, but not small, pleasures and textures. It’s poignant and droll, as if Richard Linklater was adapting John Cheever. (Rentable on VOD)

“One of Them Days” (Lawrence Lamont)

“One of Them Days” updates “Friday” for contemporary women, surpassing the Ice Cube-Chris Tucker movie in the process. Screenwriter Syreeta Singleton and director Lawrence Lamont spin absurdist parodies — of current American inequality, of differences between men and women, of tensions between white and Black people — without resorting to platitudes. This lively and hilarious movie taps into the glorious disreputability of various 1990s-era benchmarks, with superb performances by Keke Palmer and SZA.  (Streaming on Netflix)

“Black Bag” (Steven Soderbergh)

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play an urbane married couple who are also spies who may be tasked with betraying one another. Think if John le Carré wrote a Steven Soderbergh film, which is to say think “Tinker Tailor Lies and Videotape.” This is a sharp, stylish and twisty entertainment, with impeccably frosty and sexy performances by Fassbender and Blanchett in peak movie-star mode. Underneath the well-oiled cleverness is a poignant comedy of remarriage and a prickly examination of how tech casually bends our senses of intimacy. (Streaming on Peacock)

“Broken Rage” (Takeshi “Beat” Kitano)

 A story of Beat Kitano’s adventures as an assassin is told two ways: as a thriller and a comedy, respectively. Those sorts of self-reflexive gymnastics don’t always float my boat, but trust me when I say that “Broken Rage” is a fun and unusual genre exercise from a master that pinpoints the terrifyingly minute differences between comedy and tragedy. Whether staging murders or pratfalls, Kitano’s timing is droll and pristine. Ironically, though, and this is probably intentional, the thriller segment is funnier than the comedy. (Streaming on Amazon)

“Misericordia” (Alain Guiraudie)

This tale of murder and jealousy and stifled sexual hunger among a small pastoral French community is not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Guiraudie is great at taking plotting that is traditional of crime movies and novels and twisting it into surreal pretzels that are amusing and poignant because he has allowed you to invest in his characters and to watch his movie at a remove, simultaneously. Guiraudie is reminiscent somewhat of filmmaker Bruno Dumont, without the endless dilly-dallying of the latter’s work. (Streaming on The Criterion Channel)

“The Shrouds” (David Cronenberg)

If you are curious about David Cronenberg yet unfamiliar with his work, start with “The Dead Zone” and “The Fly,” work backward to his earlier horror movies, then head to “Naked Lunch” and “eXistenZ” and “Crash.” The latter are obstinate and beautiful and mercilessly poker-faced films that take Cronenberg’s occupation with body horror into the realm of the diseased mind and the tech that enables it. That is the realm where “The Shrouds” lives, where characters mourning the loss of loved ones are trapped in an impenetrable conspiracy, reaching out for connection in some of the most intimate and heartbreaking images of David Cronenberg’s career. (Rentable beginning July 8)

“Sinners” (Ryan Coogler)

People keep describing “Sinners” as a riff on “From Dusk ‘til Dawn,” which is awfully reductive. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino didn’t invent the monster siege movie, and they didn’t come anywhere close to rendering the breathtaking wealth of sex and heritage and culture and sociopolitical carnage and transcendence that Ryan Coogler manages here in his best movie since “Creed.” This film is possessed with the poetry and horror of the blues, as Coogler mounts a concert film that also manages to be a seductive phantasmagoric thriller. In a swaggering pair of performances, Michael B. Jordan is so far this year’s great badass. (Streaming on Max July 4)

“The Phoenician Scheme” (Wes Anderson)

If you find Wes Anderson’s movies insufferable, no, “The Phoenician Scheme” will not change your mind. If you believe that his movies are more turbulent and adventurous than detractors allow, and that Anderson is the most distinctive American stylist currently working, and that he, in his way, is the only filmmaker practicing lost arts such as the screwball comedy, then you may find “The Phoenician Scheme” to be enchanting as well as hilarious. Benicio del Toro gives the best lead performance to be found in Andersonland since Ralph Fiennes in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (In theaters)

 “Afternoons of Solitude” (Albert Serra)

Making his nonfiction debut, slow-cinema titan Albert Serra dives into the rituals of Peruvian bullfighting, including, yes, the torture and killing of the animals. Serra seemingly films everything, from the stabbing of the bulls in their sides with hooks to slow them down, to their taunting with the cape, to the eventual death blow, when a sword is plunged between a bull’s shoulders, to all of the strutting pageantry that bookends the spectacle. If you empathize with these animals, you will find these sequences to be profoundly painful. And yet this isn’t shallow shock cinema. Serra builds a monument to these bulls, capturing their beauty and bravery and agony, showing them to be true warriors, while the bullfighters suggest sadistic clowns, puffing themselves up for winning a game that they have rigged. The metaphoric potential is endless, and Serra’s hallucinatory long takes draw you into an appalling and transfixing carnival of carnage. (Releasing in theaters throughout July)

“Videoheaven” (Alex Ross Perry)

With “Pavements” and now “Videoheaven,” Alex Ross Perry is establishing himself as the poet of Gen X and Millennial ephemera. As the title of this three-hour, docu-essay suggests, Perry is concerned with the video store as more than simply a place to rent movies back when they were only viewable at home via physical objects that you played on your TV with other physical objects. Perry is concerned with the video store as a realm, a social hub with its own distinct etiquette and caste, and with how it influenced cinema and vice versa. Exploring virtually every facet of the video store, Perry mounts a clip show of extraordinary variety. “Videoheaven” is probably the only place, save for well, video stores, where the Toxic Avenger is allowed to share airspace with the cinema of Michael Haneke. Above all, Perry is obsessed by the video store’s impermanence as an institution that rose fast and later vanished unceremoniously. “Videoheaven” is a film of erudition and rueful passion. (Releasing later this summer)