My 2025 Top 10
It’s December. Time for the list. Every year I swear I won’t make a list and every year I make a list. Here we are.
These are MY top 10 of 2025. Not the objectively best. Not the most important. The movies that meant something to me personally in a year that I will remember for. Various reasons.
10. Mickey 17
Bong Joon-ho doing Bong Joon-ho things. Weird sci-fi with class commentary. Pattinson playing two versions of himself. Not his best work but “not Bong’s best” is still better than most people’s career highlights.
9. Materialists
Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives is maybe too long but still funny and sad in the right proportions. Dakota Johnson proving she can actually act when given material.
8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise is 62 and still doing his own stunts. The man is insane and I respect it. Pure blockbuster cinema done at the highest level.
7. Black Bag
Soderbergh doing spy movies. Talky and paranoid in the best ways. Blanchett and Fassbender playing chess with each other for two hours.
6. Nosferatu
Robert Eggers remakes the original vampire movie and makes it genuinely terrifying. Bill Skarsgård as Orlok is nightmare fuel. Horror filmmaking at its peak.
5. Andor Season 2
I know it’s television. I don’t care. This is the best Star Wars since the original trilogy and deserves recognition. Tony Gilroy understood the assignment.
4. 28 Years Later
Danny Boyle returns to the franchise he created and proves he still understands horror. Cillian Murphy haunted and broken. The best legacy sequel in years.
3. Severance Season 2
Again. Television. Again. I don’t care. This show is operating at a level nothing else is touching. Ben Stiller directing existential corporate horror.
2. Sinners
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie about Jim Crow America and it’s a masterpiece. Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Genre filmmaking with actual ideas.
1. The Brutalist
Three and a half hours. Adrien Brody. An American epic about what America does to immigrants who believe in it. Brady Corbet shot this for under $10 million and it looks like a hundred. This is why cinema exists.
Honorable mentions: Paddington in Peru, Ghost of Yōtei, GTA VI, Death Stranding 2.
Biggest disappointments: The Fantastic Four, Superman, Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Anyway. That’s the list. Disagree in the comments. Or don’t. I’ll probably ignore them either way.
See you next year.