With 2025 now at a close, it’s time to rank my favorite films of the year. Here’s the top ten, along with five honorable mentions.
Honorable Mentions:
- Anemone
- The Fantastic Four: First Steps
- Marty Supreme
- One Battle After Another
- Thunderbolts*
10. Left-Handed Girl
Director Shih-Ching Tsou, longtime collaborator of independent film legend Sean Baker (who also co-wrote and edited the film), delivers a simultaneously heartwarming and devastating story of a single mother who moves to Taipei, Taiwan with her teenage daughter I-Ann and toddler I-Jing, facing poverty. The film continues Tsou’s and Baker’s exploration of the underrepresented, dealing in class, sex work, and immigration. Shot on an iPhone in the luminous night markets of Taipei, “Left-Handed Girl” combines social realist edge with the wonderment of a five-year-old girl too young to grasp the dire situation around her. The performances are excellent across the board. Shih-Yuan Ma plays I-Ann with an obnoxious hard-edged exterior and a tragic, fragile interior. Nina Ye is the real showstopper here as I-Jing, providing a sweet and infectious soul throughout. She’s adorable in every frame, making the tragedies that strike her all the more devastating. While “Left-Handed Girl” is certainly the smallest film on this list, its intimate scale makes it one of the most powerful.
9. Eddington
Misunderstood upon its Cannes Premiere, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is a biting, consistently centrist, and holistic satire on 2020 America. Hitting both sides of the aisle with equal sympathy and criticism, Aster crafted a film that’s simultaneously sensitive and over-the-top. By not falling into cheap one-sided attacks like all other Hollywood political satires, Aster enables the audience to actually discuss and reflect upon America’s divisiveness in a productive rather than accusatory manner. Not to mention, the film is incredibly funny, most notably the shallow Brian character who’ll go from left-wing radical to right-wing radical for love or glory, which is in and of itself a brilliant commentary on the rise of virtue signaling and decline in earnestness in political discussion. While the third act flies off the handle with Schwarzenegger 80’s action, the film remains an incredibly valuable piece of social commentary that we get almost none of in modern Hollywood.
8. Friendship
The funniest cringe comedy of the last few years, “Friendship” is a wild trip through the mind of socially inept family man Craig Waterman, played by Tim Robinson with the right combination of cocaine-fueled frenzy and inwardness. The film follows Craig as he attains a new friendship with his neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd), but when Austin friend-dumps him, Craig… loses his mind. I love stories of social outcasts and the chaos of human interaction, and “Friendship” excels in that. Watching this schlub make increasingly horrendous decisions that create the most awkward interpersonal situations imaginable is such a disturbing joy. Topping it all off, this film has what may genuinely be one of the finest jokes in cinema history: the Subway toad trip. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean.
7. Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater’s warm and exuberant hangout film about the pioneers of the French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague during the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” is one of the most enjoyable films of 2025. No knowledge of this period of French Cinema is required, as the film walks the audience through the basics, though to those who do know their Nouvelle Vague, this is quite the rewarding piece. The ensemble is tremendous; not only does each actor look almost identical to their real-life counterpart, but the line delivery is sharp and unique across the board. Guillaume Marbeck in particular gives one of 2025’s most enchanting performances as the rebellious Godard. Linklater brilliantly captured the aesthetics of Nouvelle Vague films, not only utilizing their 4:3 aspect ratio and handheld black-&-white photography, but using the same font for subtitles as those 1950s/1960s movies. Most of all, I appreciated the simplicity of this film’s ambitions. Linklater doesn’t aim for an extensive historical education or a dissection of the human condition. This is simply a good time at the movies, one that’s an escapist and widely accessible treat for cinephiles.
6. It Was Just an Accident
The well-deserved winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” is a heart-stopping indictment of the Iranian regime. The film, shot secretly and illegally by the maverick Panahi, follows a ragtag group of former political prisoners that captures a man who may or may not be their former prison tormentor and now face the dilemma of what to do with this potentially innocent civilian. Panahi captures the story in extremely long takes with biting dialogue amidst barren desert landscapes or bustling cityscapes. By situating the audience in the same shot for such extended periods, Panahi better envelops the viewers into the characters’ dangerous and morally ambiguous situation. The suspense is ever-present, as no decision will end well and the characters only become more and more distraught, all building up to a spine-tingling finale for the ages that leaves the audience questioning the line between vengeance and mercy.
After the international acclaim of the film, Panahi has been sentenced for a year in prison by the Iranian government for speaking out against the regime, only demonstrating the fearlessness and necessity of his art.
5. Weapons
It’s impossible not to be engrossed by Zach Cregger’s labyrinthian horror epic about a town coping with the sudden disappearance of a class of elementary school children. After this film and “Barbarian,” Cregger has established himself as the defining horror filmmaker of the 2020s. The clever Rashomon narrative tool of shifting between different characters’ perspectives builds an entire world for the film, one with equal humanity and surrealism. As always, Cregger’s hyper-naturalistic conversations are exceptional here, as is his ability to craft sudden jolting twists that generate gasps across the audience. The ensemble brings their A-game here, fully committing to the comedic and dire aspects of the material, most of all Amy Madigan, whose villainous turn is destined to become iconic. With “Weapons,” Cregger continues to demonstrate the very best of what genre cinema has to offer.
4. Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos continues his prolific one-movie-per-year streak with my favorite of his filmography in “Bugonia.” The film follows two disturbed young men, one played by Jesse Plemons in yet another outstanding performance by our finest character actor, who kidnap a CEO they’re convinced is an alien, played by Emma Stone. The majority of the movie is composed of intense ideological debates between Plemons and Stone, with Sorkinian banter and long monologues as Plemons tries to coerce Stone into admitting she’s an extraterrestrial while Stone strategizes how to talk her way to freedom. The chess game between the characters is always compelling, ratcheting up the tension until the bombastic third act where all hell breaks loose and mind-bending reveals appear every five minutes. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is absolutely astounding: though most of the film takes place in a single basement, Ryan uses VistaVision cameras to create a large canvas with a gorgeous orange-red color palette and close-ups that look like landscapes in and of themselves. Likewise, Jerskin Fendrix’s bombastic larger-than-life score nicely contrasts the small scope, making the film feel like a science fiction epic. “Bugonia” is a textbook example of how to combine maximalist and minimalist filmmaking.
3. No Other Choice
South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice” is a riotously entertaining satire on capitalism and the hyper-competitive job market. The film follows Man-su, a family man who loses his job and after a year of failed applications, he resolves to murder his core competitors in the market, leaving him as the only hiring option. This premise, which is my favorite of 2025, enables Park to write staggeringly unpredictable twists and turns that build up to a chaotic yet neatly cohesive whole that ties together the many quirky characters and story beats. This is all peppered with over-the-top, often slapstick, humor that had my audience roaring with laughter as Man-su found himself in ludicrous situations. Overall, this is a highly intelligent film with some damn fun pulp entertainment value.
2. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne gives the performance of the year in Mary Bronstein’s stress-fueled heart attack of a movie about an overwhelmed mother experiencing a mental breakdown. Combining a grounded guerrilla style of extreme close-ups and handheld camerawork with trippy visuals, Bronstein envelops the audience into an almost unbearable nightmare of one stressful situation after another. Byrne has so much demanded of her here. She’s in almost every frame, with the film told exclusively from her subjective perspective (the face of her child is never shown, so as to illustrate her disillusionment with motherhood). Her character is sweating, screaming, crying, and/or running in practically every scene. This is an unvarnished look at the tribulations of motherhood, especially when neglected by one’s spouse, told with riveting and unrelenting momentum. Plus, it has Conan O’Brien playing the world’s worst therapist. Great film.
1. Hamnet
I have never heard more weeping by an audience than in Chloé Zhao’s heartbreaking family drama “Hamnet.” Combining natural realism with surrealism, Zhao delivers what is by far her greatest work. Fictionalizing real-world events, the film follows Agnes and William Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal) as they fall in love and build a beautiful family, only for it to collapse after tragedy strikes their son Hamnet, influencing Shakespeare’s iconic play “Hamlet.” When I first heard of this film, I was incredibly apprehensive. A period piece about Shakespeare sounded so esoteric and bland, but I could not have been more wrong. In execution, this is really a universal story of loss and how art not only reflects life, but can be used to heal and reckon with tragedy. Zhao directs the film with a surrealist edge emphasizing the natural world, as if spirits perpetually loom over the characters. The script, which Zhao co-wrote, is truly brilliant, with methodical storytelling that takes its time to make the audience fall in love with the family and wholly grasp the pain of Agnes and William. Zhao’s ethereal and traumatic work is amplified by Max Richter’s intimate score and Łukasz Żal’s cinematography that’s always gorgeous without calling too much attention to itself. Each element of the film works primarily in service of the story… something too few films remember to do.
Most of all, this film has the greatest set of performances of the past several years, with each actor delivering the finest work of their careers. Paul Mescal is phenomenal as Shakespeare, playing him with enough humanity to make him feel like a relatable human rather than a pop culture behemoth, while maintaining enough restraint to build a character whose solitude is his own worst enemy. Jessie Buckley is the bleeding soul of the film, portraying so much anguish through both subtle gazes and animalistic screams to the heavens. Much like Rose Byrne, this is a physical, guttural, brutal piece of expression. Topping them off, Jacobi Jupe plays their titular 10-year-old child with such endearing warmth that compounds Buckley’s pain. While “Hamnet” is no easy watch, it’s the kind of film that demonstrates cinema’s status as the most emotionally engaging art form.