My 10 favorite movies of 2025
Some years just aren’t good movie years, and 2025 was one of ‘em. We’re now entering an awards season where material that’s at best admirable but flawed (“Sinners,” “The Secret Agent”) and more often an example of quite bad storytelling (“Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another,” “No Other Choice,” “Sentimental Value,” “Weapons,” “It Was Just an Accident”) is going to be celebrated.
Fortunately, there’s enough to make for a solid top 10, one that feels personal. (Some runners-up/good movies not on here: “Bob Trevino Likes It,” “Bugonia,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Black Bag,” “Roofman,” “Lurker,” “The Plague.”) It’s always enjoyable to put this together, and thanks for reading!
10. Stiller and Meara: Nothing is Lost. Attempting to better understand his role as child and parent, son of artists and creator stepping outside their shadow, director Ben Stiller visibly struggles at times — to reckon both with what he doesn’t know and what he learns, even as family members interrupt each other or work to connect. The documentary wrestles with friction in all relationships and the definition of success in a way that’s very fluid and difficult. Some may find the result lacking and unresolved; others will see a complex and somewhat uncomfortable examination of how performing parents made it work, with an answer not meant to be entirely clear.
9. The Last Stop in Yuma County. Put Jim Cummings in everything. He’s just a delight, and especially at a certain kind of endearing discomfort that creates tension without feeling unwelcome. “TLSIYC” may be a genre piece, but it’s an awfully good one, tight and just distinctive enough to register while also feeling like it’s working with a framework more classic than cliche. With the Coens no longer a duo, this might be your best bet to make up for it.
8. The Naked Gun. Giddy, goofy, “I can’t believe how funny this is” laughter. Movies and TV don’t deliver that much anymore. Then there’s the new “Naked Gun,” in which Liam Neeson is being as serious as possible while delivering ridiculous lines and behavior and absolutely nailing it. There are so many great moments and sequences that shouldn’t be spoiled. Underneath is also a smirking look at arrogant, cruel billionaires, but this thing isn’t going to change the world. Just crack it up thoroughly, and even on repeat viewing. Delirious.
7. Is This Thing On? It very easily could have felt like “It’s Complicated.” Yet director Bradley Cooper (who’s also very funny as a perpetually stoned character named, yes, Balls) crafts an understated, understanding depiction of the personal and interpersonal knowledge that sometimes takes longer to show up than we think. Will Arnett and Laura Dern are great as a couple splitting up and remembering how to be individuals and considering what that means for them as a pair, while Cooper commits to close-ups, long takes, and a natural flow of life unfolding in the moment. Without the arch creepiness of “American Beauty,” “Is This Thing On?” pursues a midlife shot in the arm and earns the feeling that results.
6. Twinless. I take issue with almost any movie where we’re waiting around for a lie to be exposed, so points off. But James Sweeney (the likewise excellent “Straight Up”) is such a talented writer, director, and actor, with a particular knack for dialogue and character, that he overcomes a deception-based premise that dares to announce itself early. I’d say go in knowing as little as you can, yet “Twinless” isn’t about the story but the relationships, anchored by a tremendous dual performance by Dylan O’Brien alongside Sweeney and Aisling Franciosi. Credit to any filmmaker who can box themselves into a corner and emerge with something that feels like a different and highly affecting spin on loneliness, grief, and compassion. And bonus for anyone boosting the underrated Evan and Jaron back into the conversation.
5. The Tale of Silyan. Quick: Do you know which town in Macedonia has the largest population of white storks? For anyone not currently in Cesinovo – and maybe them too – “The Tale of Silyan,” the latest from Oscar-nominated director Tamara Kotevska (the fantastic “Honeyland”), should be a stunner. Are you going to run toward a 77-minute documentary about a man no longer able to provide for his family through farming and eventually becoming pals with a stork? Maybe not. But you’d be missing out on not just extraordinary photography and access to these animal and human personalities but a moving document of how we survive in the world, in whatever way we need to sustain us.
4. Marty Supreme. It’s easy to want to use words like “ride” or “energy” when talking about a Safdie movie. (To be clear: This applies to the Safdie brothers’ “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” and not Benny Safdie’s dull and disappointing “The Smashing Machine.”) “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s solo effort, is something like a restless conveyor belt, always in forward motion without any suggestion that there will be much relief. Timothee Chalamet crushes it as the title character, a 23-year-old Ping-Pong whiz in 1952 who has no money and actually a pretty good chance of being a world champ, depending on what trouble his mouth and flexible relationship with the truth get him into. This is the kind of movie where you can play pick your favorite scene or supporting performance and have five voters with five different picks. It’s also 145 minutes that flies by and is such accomplished entertainment that you might miss what a complicated study this is of a young Jewish man in the wake of WWII feeling like everything can be his as long as he never stops long enough for someone to contain him.
3. Train Dreams. Epic and small, lyrical but not without a story, this gorgeously shot tale of American growth, possibility, devastation and endurance is a great example of this style done about as well as it can be. Director/co-writer Clint Bentley (“Sing Sing”), adapting Denis Johnson’s novella with terrific work from Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, William H. Macy and Kerry Condon, finds great beauty alongside cruelty, hard work not far from no work, and the passage of time as something alternately slow and grand. “Train Dreams” is Malick if Malick wasn’t vapid, with the power to sweep you away.
2. It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. Unhurried and elusive, beautiful and haunted, limited yet overwhelming. Amy Berg’s documentary about the legendary singer, who died at 30 having released only one full-length album, embodies Buckley without suggesting that every rock can be overturned about someone so simultaneously present and unreachable. Like many, I was blown away at the time by “Grace” and went into this movie with quite a lot of experience and knowledge. But it’s remarkable to consider someone stumbling upon “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” on a whim and then tumbling down every musical rabbit hole and enormous emotional portal it creates. Inspiring and tragic, it’s a document of overpowering talent and countless competing circumstances and impulses, leaving one person, and the world he navigated for a short time, with a lot of awe and possibility and weight.
1. The Life of Chuck. I realize it is, in many ways, for me – at once sentimental and alarming, a hopeful coming-of-age story underscored by existential dread, that dread somehow tweaked with gratitude and resilience, and all of it bent at just the right, odd angle. Adapting a Stephen King novella, writer-director Mike Flanagan winks a few times at the grandiosity of life, the joy and destruction, the human superheroes and the inhuman, unfair wreckage. I suppose that “The Life of Chuck” won’t be for everyone, in its structure or its alignment of a single person and some much larger planetary events, or its questions about euphoria and coping and things borrowed, reopened, and lost. It is a rare movie that can envelop you into the feeling of something both comforting and new, though. And especially at a time like this, in a disappointing movie year where several of the best consider individual memories and seismic generational shifts and utilize narration in deeply poetic ways, the spell cast by Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mia Sara (really!), and everyone here elevates and embraces. Once is transcendent; the idea of re-experiencing it annually also seems more than reasonable.
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