It’s hard to overlook the fact that three of the year’s most gripping original screenplays are deeply political stories about how little we actually know about the world around us at what increasingly feels like the tail end of the Information Age. It’s a pretty scary observation, so maybe let’s focus on the “original” part of that statement; all three of these titles—along with the majority of the list that follows—were incredibly refreshing theatrical experiences to have in an era when funding something so ambitiously original and polarizingly political seems very unlikely, let alone in an era of constant existential threat for movie theaters. Given all that real-life tension, maybe it’s no wonder that each of these movies also coasted on their respective filmmakers’ unique senses of humor.
The best films of 2025 all seemed to be about both devastation and hope, life as both infinitely expansive and impossibly small (and also about finding some juicy roles for figures we previously only knew as rappers). In fact, the only sequel featured on our list is an offshoot of what is perhaps the bleakest movie I’ve seen in the 21st century so far that somehow manages to pull out of its death spiral for a movingly upbeat epilogue. In what often feels like the end of cinema as we know it, as everything gets swallowed up by a certain streaming platform and curiously powerful new studio entities that promise to “uplift” audiences with titles that ooze misinterpretation of Biblical passages, it’s a blueprint that feels more inspiring every year.
Here are our picks for the 10 best films of 2025.
10. Presence
It was about 13 years ago that Steven Soderbergh informally announced his retirement as a filmmaker, and, naturally, he’s churned out nearly as many movies since. This past year felt like a particularly strong demonstration of the Scorsesean one-for-them-one-for-me method he quickly adopted and has since mastered, where the “one for them” could really only be made by him, and the “one for me” borders on gimmick with its bizarre yet intriguing expansion of cinematic technique. The latter is, of course, Presence, a movie that seemed unfairly glossed over at the beginning of the year after its impressively subtle POV became review headline fodder ahead of the film’s wide release.
Still, in an age when horror movies about family dysfunction that hinge around the-entity-as-manifestation-of-trauma have become the groan-inducing norm among the genre, this alteration of the formula adds a crucial sense of objectivity that both permits the script to omit the tragic event itself from the story while technically using it to frame every scene. Its balance of male-manipulator storyline likely compelling to teen audiences and a slow-cinema pacing for more mature crowds—as well as its unsettling supernatural horror set against unexpected moments of laugh-out-loud comedy—feels like a gamble, yet it’s basically the same formula that made Twin Peaks so massively popular 35 years ago, and may even ease Gen-Z into the distinctly 21st-century ghost stories of Kiyoshi Kurosawa or the God’s-eye perspective comedies of Roy Andersson. — Mike LeSuer
Read our review of Presence here.
9. Train Dreams
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams takes care to look at singular moments of a logger’s life throughout the 20th century. It begins with a tree falling, a camera attached to a forest being leveled by Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton). He listens his way through the years, waiting for something to happen, for someone to love, for a reason to keep living. He travels by train, seeing the world change around him—pain, death, and heartbreak often are waiting when he disembarks. Every single shot of Train Dreams looks natural, yet overwhelming; it’s a film you can feel while you watch it. Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso create tactile, gorgeous pictures, with the softness of grass surrounding a cabin, the coarseness of a tree’s bark, and the heat from a long-day’s fire waiting to be touched all being felt, experienced.
Co-written with his filmmaking partner Greg Kwedar, the drama finds the groundedness of a simple life to be exceptional. To Bentley and Kwedar, reality constitutes a set of specific, near-random days within your life, full of strangers and lovers you wish you saw more, and might never see again. Edgerton is a quiet force, fresh-faced with wonder yet hardened by the tragedies of his life, still unwilling to submit. In one scene he sits by a campfire with an explosives expert played by William H. Macy. There’s nothing flashy or overtly dramatic about two men talking by a fire, yet it’s a scene that sticks, that feels resonant to anyone who’s felt weary after a long day and needed a story, to tell or to hear. And that’s the essence of Train Dreams, a film that’s expansive and small, just like life. — Michael Frank
Read our review of Train Dreams here.
8. Vulcanizadora
Maybe hell isn’t other people, but instead being doomed to live under the weight of our own unpunished actions. That is, at least, what Joel Potrykus’ latest pitch-black comedy insinuates. A slow-burn following two men’s fraught friendship roiling toward a fatalistic pact and its agonizing aftermath, Vulcanizadora is a direct sequel to Potrykus’s 2014 film Buzzard that retains two of its perpetually stunted players: the compulsive criminal Marty (Joshua Burge) and the manchild mortgage banker Derek (Potrykus). The similarities, though, mostly end there, as Vulcanizadora largely plays as a bleak inversion of its predecessor. Potrykus and DP Adam J. Minnick trade their prior off-the-cuff DSLR cinematography for carefully composed 16mm imagery, lingering on the disquiet of unflinching close-ups or emotionally brutalizing freeze-frame zooms.
But Vulcanizadora’s biggest distinction from Buzzard is its tone, eventually all but draining whatever twisted humor can be found in its leads’ dynamic, leaving a gradual, stomach-churning unease in its place. The film sears in its growing discomfort in what it means to live with compounding guilt, one that’s only taken seriously by the person who intimately feels it festering. Burge is especially remarkable in selling this gnawing pressure, more often than not playing the role in tense, haunted silence. At its best, as in its excruciatingly drawn-out beach-set centerpiece, Vulcanizadora maximizes how Potrykus presses down on the unconcealed bruises of his low-budget filmmaking, an arduous experience in unearthing the inherent burdens his puerile characters carry. — Natalie Marlin
Read our review of Vulcanizadora here.
7. 28 Years Later
In the era of reboots and very long-awaited sequels, it was inevitable that a third chapter to 28 Days Later would eventually come together. Danny Boyle, the director behind 2002’s original film, returns to guide the ship. With a script written by Alex Garland (who wrote the original, and Executive Produced 2007’s 28 Weeks Later alongside Boyle), 28 Years Later follows a young boy and his ill mother as they make the trek to obtain medical treatment for her. What transpires over nearly two hours is a grueling journey through a wasteland of the dead and desperately scavenging survivors. Alfie Williams delivers a surprisingly weighted performance as Spike, the 12-year-old son of Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).
Having a strong and committed cast is half the battle no matter the script, but the world Garland has crafted is equally dystopian and prehistoric. 28 Years Later feels like a natural progression in the franchise. It’s certainly not short on action, carnage, and tension-building sequences. What really lends the film its gravitas is the tremendous heart pounding at its center. Some moments get the tear ducts working overtime, a necessary component to justify the film's existence. 28 Years Later perfectly captures the spirit of 28 Days Later while also bringing its own signature tone and mood. It pushes the story forward and sets up the Nia DaCosta–directed sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, rather nicely. Set for an early 2026 release, it’s sure to kick off the year with a bang. — Bee Delores
Read our review of 28 Years Later here.
6. One Battle After Another
Come for Teyana Taylor, stay for the revolution. As Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature film, One Battle After Another has accomplished a herculean task: meeting, and even exceeding, the daunting expectations associated with a new release from an acclaimed auteur. The loose Vineland adaptation is a return to the postmodern well of Thomas Pynchon, whose work Anderson also adapted for his 2014 film Inherent Vice. Anderson impressively navigates the varied tonal complexities of America’s political turmoil in this nearly three-hour epic deftly. The film is topical yet timeless, relentless yet absurd, poignant yet darkly funny, and huge in scope yet impactfully intimate.
One Battle blends masterful filmcraft with compelling storytelling and performances that feel like lightning in a bottle, even by the already-lofty standards set across Anderson’s illustrious filmography. If you love star-making breakouts like Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, look no further than Teyana. If you prefer career-defining heights from leading men like Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio delivers. If you appreciate the addition of idiosyncratic character actors (John C. Reilly, William H. Macy), welcome Benicio Del Toro to that list. And for a surprising discovery like Paul Dano, prepare for Chase Infiniti. Plus, the ensemble is stacked with talented veterans and newcomers, including Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, and Junglepussy. — Melanie Robinson
5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
If you’ve ever been compelled to do some light research into the world of dream interpretation upon waking from a bizarre, bewildering nightmare, then you know just how fruitless this type of self-examination can be. Yet despite the seemingly enduring fact that we really don’t know what’s happening during that nocturnal subconscious spectacle, we remain obsessed. The characters of Mary Bronstein’s psychotrip dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You all desperately want to find some sort of meaning, and will look anywhere for it. “It’s not my fault you keep kissing me in my dream,” says one of Linda’s (Rose Byrne) patients during their session, straight-faced and deadly serious. This is just the kind of comedy Bronstein is interested in: absurd, a bit alarming, and very specific to the experience of a woman for whom blame is the central catalyst and obstacle for nearly every moment of her life.
Linda’s is a story both wholly recognizable and increasingly outlandish, one where the hole in the ceiling keeps getting bigger and her own therapist (a surreally cast Conan O’Brien) refuses to speak to her, where you buy cocaine off the internet with your new motel neighbor (an equally unexpected A$AP Rocky sighting) and pour thick, goopy liquid into your daughter's feeding tube. To call If I Had Legs I’d Kick You enjoyable would be missing the point. Even its punchlines—bleak as they are—don’t incite laughter so much as a knowing wince. It’s a fantastic bit of filmmaking in that it creates a world that, by the film’s end, is as undeniable as it is distressing, a dream that makes sleep seem like hell. — Sean Fennell
Read our review of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You here.
4. Weapons
Director Zach Cregger’s first studio movie, Barbarian, made incredible use of the age-old horrors of a haunted house. It was a premise of simplicity executed in a manner that was anything but, a bonkers bit of expectation manipulation taken well beyond its natural endpoint. And while Weapons, too, explores tropes as tested as the evil old witch down the lane, it’s told in such a way that you never once—until its ecstatic ending—truly get a handle on what it is that you’re watching. There are several impressive ways in which Cregger hides the ball (most notably by sectioning off the narrative into contained, character-centric vignettes), but none of this would work nearly as well if it weren’t for the superb performances of its leads—Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams—each wearing the gnarled, confused frustration of the film’s eerie, King-ian premise on their sleeves.
And then there’s that old witch I mentioned, played by Amy Madigan in a performance that is so close to the absurdity of the sketch comedy Cregger initially made a name for himself with that it nearly transcends the very idea of horror villainy. And all of this before the film’s final 20 minutes. I wouldn’t dare spoil that here, of course, but just know that it’s been years since I was filled with such unfettered, almost manic joy in a movie theater. My own euphoria exceeded only, perhaps, by the 10-year-old boy to my right who presumably will simply never be the same. — Sean Fennell
3. Marty Supreme
Since we agreed that a film wouldn’t tag itself as “supreme” if it wasn’t, indeed, superior or at least really very good, Josh Safdie’s glum yet ultimately heroic sports spectacular with its lead in a sleazy, mustachioed Timothée Chalamet winds up to be, by movie’s end, the most dynamic work of both of these artists’ careers—Uncut Gems included. It doesn’t start out quite that well. Moving through his all-consuming world, uncomfortably and unctuously, Chalamet’s richly unempathetic, charismatically confident Marty (based on true-life table tennis player Marty Reisman) is like Fast Eddie in The Hustler and The Color of Money: always out for the quick buck and the wily win even when fair-and-square is an option. Plus, he’s hardcore hustling ping-pong in the 1950s—long before that game became popularly competitive or even remotely cool.
Moving through physical space like a blunt, speeding drone with a busted direction mechanism, Chalamet’s Marty chews up and spits out those he comes in close contact with (as many others have done to him) until he can gnash no more—which is when things become really interesting, even beyond the introduction of Tyler, the Creator as a fellow hustler and Gwenyth Paltrow as a washed-up actress. What allows Chalamet’s bleak-but-buoyant Marty forward motion is Safdie’s quick, rhythmic script co-written with longtime creative partner Ronald Bronstein, cinematographer Darius Khondji’s gold-grey ambience, composer Daniel Lopatin’s dizzying everywhere-at-once score, and the director’s portrait of a queasily uneven universe where immorality is its own sparkling morality. — A.D. Amorosi
Read our review of Marty Supreme here.
2. Bugonia
Yorgos Lanthimos’ films could easily be grouped into distinct eras: his native-Greek dark comedies of repression, his hyper-affected absurdist pictures with Colin Farrell, his twistedly singular approach to prestige fare with Emma Stone. But Bugonia blurs those lines more than ever, transposing his recent work with Stone, cinematographer Robbie Ryan (here making the most of incidental and natural lighting), and experimental composer Jerskin Fendrix onto the distressing bluntness of his early work. A remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, Lanthimos updates the narrative of corporate abduction, ecological decay, and supposed extraterrestrial interference into a vernacular all too contemporary.
In the battle between Jesse Plemons’ kidnapper and Stone’s captive CEO, the dialogue plays like a ram fight between the former’s volatile conspiracy rhetoric and the latter’s PR-speak buzzwords, blathered to a point where it becomes its own alien language. Newcomer Aidan Delbis acts as the counterpoint to both, refreshingly naturalistic as a wavering accomplice to Plemons, fully embodying those who reluctantly subscribe to far-flung conspiracies when presented with no other option. Though its final punctuation of morbid excess plays a bit too broad to match what precedes it, Bugonia rankles best when prodding at the same conclusion in less overt terms. Maybe, Lanthimos argues, we’re already inducing a kind of annihilation if we’re so deep in our delusions that we can be swayed to poison ourselves, our loved ones, our world. Good luck, babe, indeed. — Natalie Marlin
1. Eddington
Eddington is Ari Aster’s first foray into the neo-Western genre, a deviation from the folk-horror foundation that anchored his first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar. Yet this shift in scenery doesn't mean a softening of his signature style: Eddington’s intensity and palpable anxiety firmly tie it to his previous work, as does the searing satire and caustic humor that underpinned his third film, Beau Is Afraid. Eddington, too, is a cynical, devastating ride, one that fans have come to expect from the cult writer-director, transposed onto the stark canvas of a tiny, fictional desert town in New Mexico that serves as the film’s namesake. Eddington’s isolated desert folk become even more so in May 2020 during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown. The narrative immediately confronts the trials and tribulations of masking and the perils of an outbreak that demands altruism in a country of “rugged,” often selfish, individualists. It’s a dark film for dark times that offers a dizzyingly accurate depiction of a recent past wherein a global crisis collided with scores of cascading societal anxieties and a moral panic or two.
The small-town drama of a mayoral reelection campaign serves as the inciting event for what slowly devolves into a surreal, nihilist jaunt through the arid wasteland. The film is stuffed with topical collective traumas that we were quickly encouraged to move past in our own reality, which is why Eddington is so haunting. The amalgamation of the political, social, and technological issues that define this era includes duplicitous politics, performative social justice, the existential dangers of social media and the chronically online, surveillance culture, misinformation, conspiracy theories, police brutality, racism, and the growing fear of Antifa. But there was no time to reckon with all of that before the next wave of existential triggers arrived: AI, data centers, the loss of critical thought amid an onslaught of social media use, and much more. Eddington sits amongst it all; it feels like it’s everything that’s wrong with the modern world in one film.
Additionally, cinematographer Darius Khondji lends the film a visual grammar of stark contrast, capturing a world where light is blinding and darkness envelops. It’s off-putting and eerie, as are its characters. The film is led by the magnetic and increasingly unhinged Joaquin Phoenix (reuniting with Aster after Beau Is Afraid) as Sheriff Joe Cross. He’s flanked by an equally compelling cast that includes Pedro Pascal as the incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia and Emma Stone as Cross’ emotionally disconnected wife, Louise. If you enjoy a narrative where nearly all the characters spectacularly suck in a surreal, fun, and irredeemable way, Eddington is your funhouse mirror. While brilliantly conceived, Aster’s conclusions remain polarizing. Eddington doesn’t offer catharsis; it lands a gut punch that reflects our age’s profound uneasiness. The film, heavy-handed or not, ushers in a final, unsettling reckoning. As Phoenix’s character queries within a different context, the film seems to ask, “How did we get here, and even worse, is it worth it?” — Melanie Robinson
Read our feature with Eddington cinematographer Darius Khondji here.
