Warner Brothers, one of the great studios, an embodiment of cinema of popular and durable quality, was responsible in 2025 for movies that seemed unlikely to exist in the modern media dystopia of endless, divided distraction. In a time in which hits are remakes of awful children’s movies, WB offered up “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another” and “Weapons.” Whether you like these movies or not, this felt hopeful …
…until WB was bought by Netflix in a move that suggests the ongoing debasement of cinema into streaming sludge. Call it a year of mixed messages. Though, taken with the endless news of POTUS’ expanding powers, coupled with his predictable hostility to corporate regulation, said messages seem to spell out something on the glass-half-empty side of the spectrum.
Yet, if I may borrow loosely from “Jurassic Park,” art always finds a way.
Fascism, corporate and governmental alike, was a big theme in movies this year. The concerns that I allude to above are clearly concerns of artists toiling in medias that our titans of industry, unchallenged by a cynical and contemptuous government, would love to relegate to AI, our new potential answer to free labor and current symptom of our addiction to convenience above any laudable pillar of society. I’m speaking for America, but movies in other parts of the world share these anxieties.
These anxieties at least led to wonderful movies this year — take your victories where you can friendos, and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Anxiety and conflict and unrest are catalysts for art. Try watching the movies below and telling me that cinema is over. I’m unlikely to find you persuasive, and I find despair to be a cop-out anyway.
25. “Cover-Up” (Laura Poitrus, Mark Obenhaus)
Poitrus and Obenhaus’ lively documentary is essentially a packaging of reporter Seymour Hersh’s greatest hits, especially his role in uncovering the My Lai massacre. The not-so-implicit message here is that reporting is dying, from corporate monopolies that control news coverage to people’s own numbed incuriosity and hopelessness. More on this one when it’s available for more people to see. [Premieres on Netflix on Dec. 26]
24. “Black Phone 2” (Scott Derrickson)
This hallucinatory, violent and surprisingly poignant slasher fantasy is a significant step up from the first one, and, in spirit, the best “Nightmare on Elm Street” entry since the original opened in 1984.
23. “Sovereign” (Christian Swegal)
A true-crime thriller that taps into the choose-your-own-reality mania of the modern age, while examining the sins of the father. The results are potent, especially for the performances of Nick Offerman and Dennis Quaid.
22. “One of Them Days” (Lawrence Lamont)
In their sly riff on “Friday,” screenwriter Syreeta Singleton and director Lawrence Lamont take aim at many loaded subjects, such as current American inequality and tensions between men and women, without resorting to platitudes. And this is the movie that decisively confirms Keke Palmer to be a star.
21. “Blue Moon” (Richard Linklater)
The downfall of lyricist Lorenz Hart is rendered here by Richard Linklater and leading man Ethan Hawke into a wounded and even buoyant story of creative powers in decline.
20. “A Little Prayer” (Angus MacLachlan)
Here is a convincing movie about working class people that isn’t condescending, a story of a family that is so hushed that I fear that people will take it for granted, assuming that “not much is happening.” What’s happening is among the most moving dramas of the year, with a faith-based story that won’t turn your head into mush.
19. “Videoheaven” (Alex Ross Perry)
As the title of this three-hour, docu-essay suggests, Perry is concerned with the video store as more than 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 before vanishing.
18. “Eddington” (Ari Aster)
Many movies this year sought to diagnose our ascendant dystopia; no others were this refreshingly unlikeable. Aster’s art western, easily his best movie so far, already feels ahead of the curve a mere season after its release. Thorny and mesmerizing, with a bracing interest in all the things that often send auteurs fleeing to period pictures: namely phones and mind-dissolving social media.
17. “Afternoons of Solitude” (Albert Serra)
Slow-cinema titan Serra dives into the rituals of Peruvian bullfighting. If you empathize with these animals, and I’m not impatient to meet you if you do not, you will find many of these sequences to be profoundly painful. And yet 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.
16. “The Phoenician Scheme” (Wes Anderson)
If you find Wes Anderson’s movies insufferable, “The Phoenician Scheme” will not change your mind. If you believe that his movies are more turbulent than detractors allow, and that Anderson is the most distinctive American stylist currently working, and that he is the only filmmaker practicing lost arts such as the screwball comedy, then you may find “The Phoenician Scheme” to be enchanting and barbed as well as hilarious.
15. “Sentimental Value” (Joachim Trier)
Is this well-oiled tear-jerker an art movie for the IKEA crowd? It almost seems too smooth, yet it is too well-crafted to dismiss, with Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve giving performances of a lifetime as a father and daughter who seek to launder trauma through a project that bears a resemblance to the movie we’re watching. Trier twists this pretzel into a self-aware yet lacerating Bergman joint for a modern age.
14. “Black Bag” (Steven Soderbergh)
Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett play an urbane married couple who are spies possibly tasked with betraying one another. Think if John le Carré wrote a Soderbergh film: “Tinker Tailor Lies and Videotape.” Underneath the chic sexiness is a poignant comedy of remarriage and an examination of how tech bends our sense of intimacy.
13. “Splitsville” (Michael Angelo Covino)
This is the funniest movie that I have seen in years, merging a romantic quadrangle with the committed cartoon violence of something like Danny DeVito’s “The War of the Roses.” Dakota Johnson is brought back to life here from the awful “Materialists.”
12. “Sirāt” (Olivier Laxe)
A singular blend of action and acid western and rave culture vibes that connects to the rootlessness felt by many today. A cross-country trek becomes a pressurized requiem for hope and a sense of identity, with a handful of the most surprising and suspenseful scenes of the year. Pairs well with “One Battle After Another.” More on this one next year when it will be available for more folks to see.
11. “Peter Hujar’s Day” (Ira Sachs)
One day in NYC in 1974, photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz discussed the previous day in his life in detail over many hours, recording the results. Adapting the recording and the book that Rosenkrantz later wrote, Sachs mounts an ecstatic ode to the small textures of life, to the bottomlessness of a vanished moment, especially as acted by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in monumental performances.
10. “The Shrouds” (David Cronenberg)
The obstinate and empathetic realm of “Naked Lunch” and “Crash” is where “The Shrouds” lives, mining the body horror of the diseased mind and the tech that enables it. Characters mourning the loss of loved ones are trapped in an impenetrable conspiracy, reaching out for connection in what are among the most intimate and heartbreaking images of David Cronenberg’s career.
9. “One Battle After Another” (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Little wonder that this movie was divisive, as it is a chase comedy slash satire slash action thriller slash wet dream of a revolution that folds in the face of relentless neo-Christian fascism. It is very timely and very aware of it, yet Anderson keeps the movie in constant ferocious swing. It’s a miracle that this movie exists, let alone that it hits on this many different registers without burning out.
8. “Sinners” (Ryan Coogler)
For the record, 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.” Coogler mounts a concert film that also manages to be a seductive phantasmagoric thriller. In a swaggering pair of performances, Michael B. Jordan is this year’s great badass.
7. “By the Stream” (Hong Sang-soo)
A sexual controversy rattles the intelligentsia of a college campus. No, I’m not talking about “After the Hunt,” but this more probing film by South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, whose talky and deceptively low-key aesthetic continues to astonish in its adaptability. In one of his most ambitious movies in years, Hong shows how a scandal unearths the skeletons of a family’s past, merging the personal and the political. It’s as dense as “Sentimental Value” and even more intimate, continuing to reverberate.
6. “Cloud” (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
In Kurosawa’s newest deadly precise allegory for modern urban life, the blood sport of online scams, and scapegoating, is literalized into a crisp and kinetic action movie. The 180 is quite sudden: We’re watching a slow-burn character study of a dude who sells janky stuff online and then we’re watching everyone try to kill him. I initially missed the subtlety of Kurosawa classics like “Creepy” and “Chime” but “Cloud” continues to grow in stature, and Kurosawa’s control is extraordinary.
5. “It Was Just An Accident” (Jafar Panahi)
Panahi’s anguished and electrifying feature is a rare movie that manages not to glamorize revenge, no matter how understandable the desire for it may be. Doors keep opening up here, as characters shift and the tone daringly evolves from despairing to farcical to even life-affirming. The movie is unmooring and all the more thrilling for it.
4. “The Mastermind” (Kelly Reichardt)
A heist movie turned inside out by Reichardt, who unearths the unease uniting an art thief with yuppies with war protestors with the wives who are watching men make a sport of ruining their lives. Funny, unpredictable, indelible, and haunting.
3. “Eephus” (Carson Lund)
Lund fashions what may one day go down as one of the classic American baseball movies. Two adult league teams play a final game on a field that’s about to be razed, conjuring all sorts of notions of the cat and the cradle, which is to say the film captures the fleetingness of little textures and moments that come to define life.
2. “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 takes plotting that is traditional of crime movies and novels and twists it into surreal knots that are amusing and poignant because he has allowed you to invest in his characters and to watch his movie at a remove, simultaneously. By the end, you may feel as if submerged neuroses have been captured without being able to quite put your finger on how or why.
1. “The Secret Agent” (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
With its arresting blend of genre tropes and alternative history, “The Secret Agent” suggests Brazil’s answer to the Quentin Tarantino of “Inglourious Basterds” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” without Q.T.’s shock jock self-consciousness. Unfolding in Recife against the corrupt regime of the 1970s, Filho’s film offers a tapestry of dozens of vivid characters and ecstatically detailed scenes, operating as an espionage story, a movie-movie, and an ode to the cinema that formed its creator. Filho spins his great documentary “Pictures of Ghosts” into a glorious myth and a reprieve for souls lost to fascism, and to the memories that are kept alive in spite of ourselves. More on this one next month.
