My Favorite Movies of 2025

I made a first pass on this list back in June, mostly because this has been an unusually good year for movies (if not a good year for anything else), and I somehow already had 10 favorites within the first six months.

At the time, I wondered whether the list would change by the end of the year, or if things had already peaked, and it would just be a repeat. Turns out it did change pretty significantly, thanks mostly to a summer surprise.

Other surprises:

• The movies I’d been most highly anticipating to be my favorites came in at numbers 9 and 6 on the list.
• The two movies I’d been dreading watching, based solely on their trailers, turned out to be not bad at all (15) and actually pretty great (4).
• Two that I wouldn’t have expected to enjoy at all (12 and 8) turned out to be much better than I’d expected.
• I came out of M3GAN 2.0 on a high, loving it and against my better judgment, rating it 4 stars. But that was really only for one specific (and still brilliant) scene, and I can’t in good conscience put it anywhere on a best-of list because it’s honestly just not that good.
• The most baffling movie of the year was Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that was so completely unbothered by how dumb it was. I keep reading people online speculating that the series takes place in some kind of alternate reality, and that’s honestly the only idea that makes any kind of sense.
• I’ve seen more movies in 2025 alone than I’ve seen in the last several years combined, and yet I’ve had to suffer through surprisingly few stinkers.
• Some of my favorites, including my favorite movie this year, seemed (to me at least) to come out of nowhere and take me completely by surprise.

The Runners Up

15. Together

You kind of have to respect this movie just for how much Alison Brie and Dave Franco commit to it so completely. It’s body horror that didn’t feel overwhelmingly nasty, and it ultimately feels unsettlingly romantic. Over the course of the year, a theme of “fearless sincerity” started to emerge across my favorite movies, and I think this one fits, by presenting a gruesomely codependent relationship that’s also kind of sweet.

14. Eternity

I still don’t understand how this movie managed to have so many objectively beautiful people and make them all look kind of plain. But apart from that, it’s a charming and genuinely funny take on the romantic comedy format, exploring what happens in the “happily ever after” part.

13. Frankenstein

It’s beautiful, and cinematic, with stunning set design, costume design, and character design. It’s got an intelligent script that’s a personal statement from the writer and director while still being a faithful adaptation of the original story. And it balances darkness and beauty in a way that seems unique to Guillermo del Toro.

12. Ballerina

This is the year I finally watched John Wick, and while it didn’t blow me away, I can now at least understand why it resonated with people enough to launch a franchise. I had no expectations of Ballerina, but it did manage to blow me away. Relentless action, with fight choreography that actually let me follow what was going on, and was often funny. I’ve still only seen two movies in the franchise, but I appreciate how they’re trying to build an action movie mythology instead of being fixated on being grounded or realistic.

11. The Life of Chuck

I had to think about this one for a while, since I was trying to force it into the category of “Stephen King’s sentimental stories, not the supernatural horror ones,” without appreciating that it can be kind of both. Outstanding performances from Karen Gillan, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Matthew Lillard in particular. The thing that’s stuck with me is how it balances the sweet and sinister, the tragic and uplifting, the spectacular and the mundane, exactly how a story about life should. I still hate the narration, though.

The Top 10

10. Black Bag

I still think it tries a little too hard to be a power fantasy for affluent middle-aged people who desperately need to think they’re still cool, but it’s stuck with me throughout the year. Steven Soderbergh understands how to make movies feel cool and memorable, which is why I’ve only seen Out of Sight once but still consider it one of my favorite movies of all time.

9. The Fantastic Four: First Steps

This was my most anticipated movie of the year, and I enjoyed it a lot, but also feel little desire to watch it again. It’s great as an adaptation of the Fantastic Four, because it nails not just the mid-century aesthetic, but the dynamics of the family, and the feeling of optimism that sufficiently advanced science can solve any problem. That also means that people who didn’t already love these characters are unlikely to be won over by this take on them, no matter how well it was executed. And I can’t imagine their being anywhere near as appealing when taken out of their environment and mixed in with the rest of the MCU.

But Michael Giacchino’s score might be my favorite of any Marvel movie. I think the most joyous moment for me in First Steps had nothing to do with the plot, but just watching the motion graphics of the end title sequence playing out in IMAX 3D while listening to that amazing theme song.

8. 28 Years Later

I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the franchise, so I had zero expectations from this, and might have skipped it altogether if I didn’t have the AMC subscription. But I’d forgotten just how bold and experimental Danny Boyle gets with his movies. There’s a feeling of freedom you rarely see outside of animated features. A sense of “these are movies, not documentaries. We can show whatever we want, so why not go for it?”

7. KPop Demon Hunters

I’m glad I watched this a second time, because it let me shut off the part of my brain that kept screaming, This wasn’t made for you! and just enjoy it. It’s almost as experimental with its character designs, animation styles, and overall look as the Spider-Verse movies, but without drawing as much attention to the craft and just staying light, fun, and completely accessible.

6. Wake Up Dead Man

It’s absurd to call this “my least favorite in the Knives Out trilogy,” because it’s excellent. That only makes sense for star ratings, or ranked lists like this one. But at least it made me reconsider what it is that defines “a Knives Out movie” besides Benoit Blanc.

I realized that the most significant commonality is that they’re all so unabashedly opinionated. They all center on a fundamentally good character who’s surrounded by people who range from flawed or misguided to outright evil. It’s tempting to be cynical and assume that you can’t build a compelling story around a character who’s genuinely virtuous, but these movies feel uplifting because they celebrate good people, instead of treating incorruptibility as a flaw.

5. Weapons

The one thing that sticks with me about this movie is how much it defies over-interpretation or analysis. It’s just an intriguing, funny, suspenseful, downright scary, sad, and then hilarious again story, well-told. And it works specifically because its structure of interleaving stories puts all of the intrigue in exactly the right places.

4. Final Destination Bloodlines

The Final Destination series has always been something that I loved in concept more than execution. When they work, they’re exactly the right kind of “active storytelling” the best horror and suspense movies do, where your brain is constantly firing off possibilities of what might happen next.

But Bloodlines is the first one to absolutely nail the formula, and they did it by getting the tone exactly right. Characters likeable enough so that you’re invested in their stories, but not taken so seriously that it’s miserable watching these people who are all doomed to die horribly. It’s possibly the best movie I’ve seen at understanding the similarities between horror and comedy, getting the timing so perfectly right that the most gruesome moments are also the funniest.

3. Companion

Back in June, I named this my favorite of the year with little hesitation. I still think that it’s a near-flawless screenplay, with outstanding performances from everyone, and a real sense of humor that doesn’t undermine the scenes of real horror. But it’s also undeniably a movie with modest ambitions that nails them, and when you’re doing something as pointless as ranking movies in order, modest ambitions get outranked.

I still love this movie, and I especially love it for being the best expression I’ve ever seen of a profound idea: that the love you choose to give to people belongs to you. No matter what they choose to do with it, and no matter how awful they turn out to be, it’s still yours, and it’s still “real.”

Useful for looking back on relationships that have ended, whether they’re romantic or friendships, and instead of feeling gullible or foolish, concentrating instead on celebrating your own capacity for love.

2. Sinners

I’ve seen it three times now, and it’s still impossible not to think at least once, now this is cinema.

Which sounds pretentious, because it is, but also it says a lot about how divisions between “genre movie” and “art film” have become so completely irrelevant that the most cinematic, profound, and impactful movie of the year is also so largely dedicated to vampire fights and cunnilingus. Calling out how phenomenal the music is feels like disrespect towards how phenomenal everything else is.

It is likely the “best” movie of 2025, but since this is a ranked list of favorites, I’ve got to put it just behind the movie that hit me the hardest.

1A! 1A! Superman

I spent the better part of the summer trying to figure out how exactly a movie that felt so corny, on-the-nose, and prone to going off on clunky tangents, still charmed me so completely that it eventually turned into an irrational love. Like The Force Awakens did, but less explicable, since I’ve never loved Superman anywhere near as much as Star Wars.

Ultimately, I think it’s so effective because it’s so on the nose. It’s a movie about fearless kindness, and it delivers that message by being fearlessly sincere. It says that we shouldn’t be afraid of looking silly or corny, we shouldn’t be embarrassed about the things that connect with us (like comic books), and we should never be afraid of doing the right thing.

Meaning that it rejects all my attempts to categorize, analyze, and interpret it, because it bypasses all the defenses in my brain and lodges itself directly in my heart. Looking for images for this post meant that I watched the ending of Superman several more times, and you’d think I’d be over it by now, but it still brings tears to my eyes every damn time.

Best Movies I Saw For the First Time in 2025

10. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

It’s so dark and punishingly cruel that I had to turn it off in the middle of one of Rocket’s flashbacks, because I was getting too upset. But it’s the end of a trilogy that brought goofy fun to the MCU, and which was the end of a difficult production and the end of a studio relationship, so it feels like putting everyone through the worst so that the catharsis at the end has the biggest payoff.

9. The Innocents

An all-time classic ghost story that I’d been hearing about for years, based on a novella that I never particularly liked. It was very slow going at first, even by the standards of the early 1960s, when everyone had longer attention spans and more patience. But once things start to unravel, it becomes deeply unsettling, with images that seem tame or even quaint compared to modern adaptations of The Turn of the Screw, but are much more disturbing in context. And thinking too much about the implications will inspire a kind of existential dread.

8. Freaky

A silly horror comedy with an outstanding premise and some surprisingly great performances from a cast that has to keep everything just over the top. It’s just plain fun, and it deserves to be ranked up with Happy Death Day in the Blumhouse horror comedies.

7. Oculus

This has been on the backlog since I became a fan of Mike Flanagan’s, and should be required viewing for anyone who’s a fan of his Netflix series, since Oculus feels a little bit like a test bed for them. As soon as it sets up its premise, it fills you with dread about what you’re going to see next. And hoping that it’ll be somehow be able to escape the ending that it so clearly foreshadows.

6. Under the Skin

The image of the black void had been lodged into public consciousness long before I got the chance to see the movie, but it’s still effective: weird, disorienting, and ambiguously sinister. It’s effectively a movie about a serial killer, and a movie that is often so callously and dispassionately cruel that it feels nihilistic, but then it ultimately makes you feel some level of empathy for them.

5. The Witch

Watching Nosferatu made me realize I need to get caught up on all of Robert Eggers’s movies. This might make for a good double feature, since they’re both masterful at establishing a mood, and a sense of ever-present dread of a coming evil that will inevitably destroy everything.

It’d also make for a good double feature with The Innocents, as movies about people forced to confront an evil that’s impossible for them to understand or explain, because they have insufficient frame of reference. I’d end with The Witch, though, because it at least has a happy ending.

4. Edge of Tomorrow

On the backlog forever, this was the Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day movie with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, something you have to point out because it’s got a bad title that doesn’t say much of anything.

It’s every bit as good as I’d heard it was. Despite the time loops, it doesn’t actually subvert that much from corny sci-fi action movies — apart from Cruise playing a character who’s so deliberately unlikeable at the start — but just executes on the formula so well.

3. Paddington

This was the year I finally watched Paddington and Paddington 2, and I finally got to experience what so many people had been talking about: being struck directly in the heart, and then feeling all of the joy and kindness radiating throughout your entire body. I think I liked Paddington a little bit more, because it felt as if they were still establishing what these movies could be and experimenting with how they could work.

2. Nosferatu

I’d expected this just to be a stylish, modern, faithful adaptation of Dracula, an attempt to “get back to the literary origins” or whatever, and undo the Universal monsters and the past century making a copy of a copy of a copy. Not sure why I thought that, exactly, because it’s an adaptation of a movie that was already an adaptation of Dracula, which happened to have fixed 90% of the issues that make me dislike the original book.

Anyway, I loved it. Not so much for its attempts to modernize the story — although I very much appreciated its condemnation of the patriarchy — but for its going all-in on mood and style. It starts with the “gothic horror” and “melodrama” dials turned to maximum, and it just leaves them there for the entire runtime. And because every single person in the cast seems to know exactly what kind of moving they’re making, it never boils over and becomes too silly and over-the-top to be enjoyable.

1. The Favourite

I already loved this movie at about five minutes in, and it kept refusing to disappoint me. The weirdness and cinematic affectations don’t feel like distracting, unnecessary, flourishes, but actually land. This is supposed to feel surreal and weird, because these were all extremely weird people. It somehow balances funny and sad, presenting a story that doesn’t really have any good guys, but still makes you feel for each one of them.