Netflix and Paramount’s ongoing war to acquire Warner Bros. is merely further confirmation that the film industry—faced with dwindling post-COVID ticket sales and growing threats from streaming—is in a state of severe flux, its long-term future uncertain.
Nonetheless, 2025 was arguably as steady and rich a year in cinema as we’ve seen in a long time, full of American and international productions that illustrated the continuing depth and breadth of the medium.
For those willing to leave their couches and head to their local multiplex or art house, there were riches galore to be found, demonstrating that when it comes to diverse, moving, awe-inspiring artistry, there’s still nothing like the big screen.
There were, in fact, so many tremendous movies since January that a Top 10 list can’t contain them all.
From the roiling thrills and humor of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, to the breakneck you-are-there terror of Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka, to the nail-biting “what if?” terror of Kathryn Bigelow’s House of Dynamite, politics were, unsurprisingly, front and center.
However, tales of personal hardship, betrayal, resilience, and absurdity also abounded, be it the sultry theatricality of Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, the wackadoo AI critique of Radu Jude’s Dracula, or the outright lunacy of Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, which provided (along with Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun reboot) a cornucopia of ridiculous laughs to help temporarily alleviate the year’s real-world chaos.
With cinephiles rewarded with stellar new releases from David Cronenberg, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kelly Reichardt, Park Chan-wook, Guillermo del Toro, Jia Zhangke, Ira Sachs, Mona Fastvold, and Steven Soderbergh (twice!), and mainstream audiences bestowed with crowd-pleasing blockbusters like A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, and Wicked: For Good, there was something for everyone in the dark of a theater.
Yet even in a jam-packed field, a handful of titles separated themselves from the pack, and it’s those that we celebrate most enthusiastically with this, our rundown of the best films of 2025.
10. The History of Sound
Headlined by two of this era’s most gifted male actors, The History of Sound is a wrenching tale of love and loss, focused on a pair of early 20th-century men, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor), whose passion for music—and desire to study and immortalize it—brings them together.
Oliver Hermanus’ adaptation of Ben Shattuck’s short story is, first and foremost, a doomed romance led by superbly graceful turns by its stars, who continue to prove themselves daring and dexterous artists. But what makes this period piece so poignant and haunting is its tender portrait of the inexorable desire to hold onto that which will inevitably vanish—an impulse that speaks, affectingly, to the aims of cinema itself.
9. Zodiac Killer Project
Charlie Shackleton wanted to direct a feature based on The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, a book by California Highway Patrolman Lyndon E. Lafferty about his 1970s search for the Zodiac Killer. When that didn’t pan out, however, he crafted Zodiac Killer Project, a documentary about the film he would have made that doubles as an incisive act of criticism.
Picking apart the genre’s favorite formal and narrative devices, it shines a spotlight on its brethren’s canny manipulations. At the same time, though, it tells a gripping (and, thanks to Shackleton’s narration, funny) story that underscores the effectiveness of the very tropes it’s analyzing. The result is a meta non-fiction affair that feels like the first and last word on true crime.
8. Marty Supreme
For his maiden behind-the-camera venture without brother Benny, Josh Safdie reteams with his Uncut Gems screenwriting partner Ronald Bronstein for Marty Supreme, a rollercoaster character study cast in the same mold as their prior collaborations and infused with blistering ’70s-cinema attitude.
Their saga of native New Yorker Marty Mauser’s (Timothée Chalamet) quest to become a table tennis world champion in 1952 is a frenzied, cacophonous bruiser of a film, intensely attuned to their protagonist’s indefatigable (and often foolhardy) hustler spirit.
Expanding upon their past work with feverish grandeur, it careens and crashes like a perpetual car wreck, fueled by the finest performance of Chalamet’s career. A go-for-broke epic about American ambition and one man’s evolution from striving child to budding adult, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour anxiety attack.
7. Sirât
At the edge of the world, a man searches for his missing daughter, only to find ravers seeking communion in the arid, empty Moroccan desert. His subsequent trip through this unforgiving milieu (with his young son in tow) transforms into a quasi-post-apocalyptic nightmare in the hands of director Óliver Laxe, whose Sirat channels everything from Mad Max: Fury Road and 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Wages of Fear and Dune.
Scored to Kangding Ray’s thunderous, hypnotic electronica, this immersive effort is a desolate snapshot of a father’s love and of modernity coming apart at the seams, and its power grows with each step along its rocky, treacherous path. It’s a film that burrows deep beneath the skin, and is punctuated by a nerve-rattling shock whose reverberations linger long after the credits have rolled.
6. Resurrection
Bi Gan is a cinematic fabulist whose fantasies about the past, present, and future of the art form play out in jaw-dropping single takes that navigate time and space with otherworldly elegance.
With Resurrection, the Chinese auteur refines his singular style for a science fiction head trip about a tomorrow in which eternal life has been achieved by doing away with dreams, and an agent (Shu Qi) assigned to hunt down one of the few surviving dreamers who’s hopscotching through classic films.
What ensues is a spectacular down-the-rabbit-hole journey that pays tribute to the whole of movie history, even as it pioneers a new way forward via boundless imagination and imposing creativity. It’s both a reverie of all that’s come before, and like nothing else.
5. The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson is a one-of-a-kind great, and he remains at the top of his game with The Phoenician Scheme, a boisterous comedy about a notorious international businessman (played with delirious wit by Benecio Del Toro) with a knack for surviving plane crashes, a fondness for daring schemes, and an estranged nun daughter (Mia Threapleton) who re-enters his life at the very moment he’s attempting to pull off his riskiest deal yet.
Anderson uses his conceit for the sorts of ingenious visual gags that have become his trademark, and he wrings delightful performances from his all-star cast, which includes Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Michael Cera steals the show, though, with a laugh-out-loud funny turn as a Swedish tutor with a thing for insects.
4. Sentimental Value
An aging director’s struggle to reconcile with his grown daughters, one of whom is an actress he wants to star in his latest autobiographical project, is the catalyst for Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s incisive and touching drama about the knotty intersections of real and movie life.
Spearheaded by the impressive trio of Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas—as well as Elle Fanning as an American actress who’s hired by Skarsgård’s director—the film is a nimble memory box that agilely connects the dots between the traumas of yesterday and the schisms of today, all of them filtered through (and/or affected by) the stage and screen productions that have defined these individuals’ lives.
With a deftness and sensitivity that heightens its complex emotional dynamics, it’s the Norwegian auteur’s finest work to date.
3. The Secret Agent
A pulse-pounding thriller about a man on the run from dictatorial forces in 1970s Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is brimming with tension, paranoia, and passion.
Blending humor and horror, fear and hope, joy and anguish, the writer/director’s exceptional fourth feature is an intoxicating saga of life under authoritarianism, following its hero as he traverses a fraught landscape populated by oppressors and the oppressed, the latter of whom he befriends while trying to gain intel on his deceased mother, reconnect with his young son, and avoid the two hitmen sent to finish him off.
Walking multiple tightropes with exhilarating expertise, it’s a genre-bending film about community, defiance, tyranny, and memory that—buoyed by Wagner Moura’s magnificent lead turn (which earned him Best Actor prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and from the New York Film Critics Circle)—won’t soon be forgotten.
2. Blue Moon
Ethan Hawke hits a career high note with Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s inviting and invigorating character drama about Lorenz Hart, the acclaimed American lyricist whose partnership with Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) begat some of musical theater’s most enduring hits.
It’s the conclusion of that collaboration which serves as the focus of Linklater’s terrific film, which takes place at Sardi’s on the night of the debut of Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!—a triumph that seemingly marks the end of Hart’s association with Rodgers and, moreover, his once-formidable fortunes.
A love letter to old Broadway and a melancholy portrait of a multifaceted man of titanic talents and failings, it’s as beautifully directed as it is adroitly written (by Robert Kaplow), affording Hart one last bittersweet moment in the spotlight courtesy of Hawke’s tour-de-force.
1. Train Dreams
Train Dreams is, on the face of it, a modest story about an early 20th-century logger (Joel Edgerton) who, with quiet perseverance, earns his keep alongside fellow Pacific Northwest itinerants, builds a home and family with his wife (Felicity Jones) and newborn, and grapples with crushing tragedies that forever alter his destiny.
However, in the hands of director Clint Bentley (Jockey) and his Sing Sing co-writer Greg Kwedar, it resounds as a lyrical, breathtaking, and profound meditation on the impermanence—and yet vital importance—of every life. Awash in violence and tenderness, desolation and bliss, and the ephemeral and the eternal, Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella is as gorgeous as it is heartbreaking, with Edgerton, Jones, William H. Macy, and Kerry Condon imbuing the material with a grandeur that’s enhanced by its aesthetic splendor (including Will Patton’s evocative narration).
It’s one of the decade’s great American films, and certainly the best of this most bountiful year.
Honorable Mention:
It Was Just an Accident, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Friendship, Caught by the Tides, Splitsville, Hedda, Vulcanizadora, Kontinental ’25, Die, My Love, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.
