Best Films of 2025: #50–41

2025 is the year of the teeter-totter. We teeter on the first half of the decade, defined by death and the uninhibited embrace of a digital world, and totter on the second half, defined, so far, by malfeasance in all sectors of public life across the globe. The films on this list move that teeter-totter. Some kick up with hard-earned optimism, others push down with well-deserved cynicism; they all, one way or another, exert pressure on the crazy, awful, sometimes wonderful quagmire we’ve found ourselves in, and show us that cinema — even when backed into the far corner of the playground by Big Tech — still has plenty to offer. As we wade our way into 2026, may we take the offerings these movies share with us to heart.

Modernist literature and cinema shaped one another since the earliest days of both. The prospects of storytelling through realistic moving images and the invention of montage transformed the structure of the written word; the new, subjective, stream of consciousness narration and the wasteland of modernity that it portrayed in turn allowed the development of popular genres like the hard-boiled novel and the film noir. Graham Swon’s second feature, An Evening Song (for Three Voices), makes these histories and relations overt in both story and form. Two of its three characters are a middle class couple who write serious literary works and cheap popular stories, respectively. The third is a young and very religious maid who is enamored by her employers and their words, and is often unable to see the distinctions of high and low forms. In a pastoral and temporal haze, the characters monologue and dialogue about literature, their feelings for each other, and the blurred lines between the two. The story hardly matters, though. Taking a Woolfian cue, Swon and his actors build their film through the intertwined narration of the three characters, more often in contrapuntal voiceover than diegetic speech, and the highly textured and vignetted images of a grainy glass filter. The film (set in 1939) seems deliberately to look into the literary and cinematic past as a dreamy memory, but its effect is something new: a visionary song of sounds and images pulled apart and reformed into an intricately sensual aesthetic landscape. — ALEX FIELDS

Part of what makes a film exciting is its ability to surprise, to create something genuinely new, to assemble images in novel ways, to stir emotions, to put them in an unexpected relation to each other, to find commonalities where others would find only differences. Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc, directed by Tatsuya Yoshihara, offers surprises in spades. How many films feature a scene of their main character concluding a movie marathon date by weeping along with his companion over Grigory Chukhray’s Ballad of a Soldier, a Soviet war romance from 1959? How many can boast an extended fight scene where a teenager with chainsaw blades protruding from his arms and head rides a shark up and down the sides of buildings while another teenager with a bomb for a head lays waste to a massive Japanese city? How many include both? It’s not so much that the breezy romantic coming-of-age/workplace comedy-drama (that just happens to also feature an array of devils, demons, and fiends) and its juvenile character dynamics is disrupted when the film’s second half and its non-stop violent action rolls around. What Chainsaw Man does, rather, is construct its emotional ecosystem in such a way that it accommodates both of these modes. Not only are the massive action set pieces that make up almost an hour of the film’s runtime noteworthy for how liberated they feel on a formal level, but also for how well they’re able to sustain the underlying drama — well enough to carry things through to a conclusion that, once again, feels achingly human in scale. — FRED BARRETT

To anyone who’s watched it, the many beauties of 7 Walks with Mark Brown will seem easy and evident. We, along with the movie crew, follow the titular Brown, a botanist, as he identifies and names, through seven walks and across seven days, plants of the Normandy region of France. It’s a documentary set in beautiful landscapes, about beautiful plants and flowers; and, if the stunning digital photography of the first half wasn’t enough, the second one is shot in glorious 35mm. How could such a premise give anything but a beautiful object? And yet, we would be wrong to ascribe the merits of this movie to this most superficial layer. What makes the strength of 7 Walks, more than the plastic beauty of its images, is the very particular rhythm directors Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton weave from the images and sounds collected during these seven walks. In the first half, when we accompany the crew as they film details of the landscape and close-ups of plants, a very precise, indescribable feeling of peaceful melancholy sets the tone; by the seventh and last day, their every dialogue takes on the air of an elegy. Then, when the second half starts and we get to see the result of this week of filming, this melancholy concentrates, becomes dense, to the point that we can almost see it. We hear Mark Brown as he, in the silence of the projection room, reminisces about those seven days, now in the past, and tries to name all the plants to be found in all these breathtaking shots. — MATHEUS FELIX

The changes made by Spike Lee in adapting Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low into his most recent film Highest 2 Lowest range from geographical (swapping Yokohama for New York) to cultural (the earlier film was about an executive of a nondescript shoe company, while in the recent film we’re steeped in the music industry) to structural (our protagonist played by Toshiro Mifune becomes a supporting player as the film gives way to a police procedural, whereas star Denzel Washington remains very much an active participant in trying to retrieve his nest egg). But the most constructive revision is this: Washington’s David King is all too aware of how many people view his wealth and status as a means to an end. The character doesn’t operate at a remove from an ivory tower (even if he might live in the penthouse of a skyscraper), but rather moves through his day-to-day life humoring transactional overtures. Everyone he smiles at or shakes hands with wants something from him, be that an aspiring artist hoping to get signed to his record label or his own wife asking if they can donate a million dollars to one of her favorite charitable causes. When the son of his live-in chauffeur is kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity and held for a $17.5 million ransom, it’s less a matter of a principled man being pushed to make an impossible choice at great personal cost than merely the latest (and largest) example of someone holding out their hand to him and expecting David to solve their problems for them. It’s a choice that courses with cynicism and weariness, earning Lee unfair critiques for finally throwing in with “the man,” but the filmmaker can’t be pinned down that easily. Instead, Washington’s character reveals himself as someone who can still operate at the level of the streets, willing to be his own bagman, mix it up with violent criminals, and even spit a freestyle verse when called upon. For all his success, what fuels the character is the same hunger and resentment that we see in those who would steal from him. But the takeaway here is you will not out hustle a man who refuses to slow down enough to let the world catch up with him. — ANDREW DIGNAN

Too few documentaries in our present streaming era — dominated as it is by overly manufactured products designed to titillate viewers with sensationalism, engage in (sub)cultural voyeurism, and pull rugs — demonstrate skill with observation. Which is but one of many reasons to celebrate Suzannah Herbert’s Natchez, a community portrait that understands the fundamental upstream-downstream nature of history, particularly a history haunted by the twin sins of racism and immense wealth, and how that alternating current defines a place and its people. As a director, Herbert affords space and voice to her subjects, which results in a film as rich in scenes of patience and erudition as it is bursting at the seams with instances of microaggression and, eventually, outright venom. But while Herbert demonstrates no instinct toward developing any texture of the aforementioned sensationalism, it finds her film nonetheless in the form of David Garner, owner of the locally celebrated Choctaw Hall. A fascinating, in many ways contradictory, amalgam of affected Southern gentility, physical frailty, and egomania, Garner is the kind of deliriously arch villain that Tarantino might dream up: an openly gay man of inherited privilege who espouses neo-Confederate ideology, romanticizes the Old South, and hurls openly hateful and racist rhetoric during the ostensibly decorous tours of his family home. But Natchez’s true strength lies in resisting the trap of centering this abhorrent man, instead introducing his true nature only near the film’s end as an exclamation mark to the far more restrained survey of history’s persistence into the present that Herbert orchestrates prior. When wading into the waters of such catchpenny content as virulent racists shamelessly parading their iniquities in public, it’s a tough ask not to opt for dramatic finger-wagging and the giving of rope. In this resistance, Natchez is a small miracle. — LUKE GORHAM

The spoof movie has always been a hit-or-miss subgenre, especially in terms of longevity. Some of my fondest adolescent memories involve sneaking off to see Meet the Spartans and Epic Movie against my parents’ wishes, when the local theater still sold out and over-sold screenings. I was so committed to Meet the Spartans that I surrendered to the sticky floor of the main aisle. I made that choice; I could have received a refund otherwise. In retrospect, these early-aughts spoofs are painfully unwatchable, so reliant on their ephemeral cultural references and sight gags that they remain exactly that: ephemeral. But 2025 brought something special in the form of The Naked Gun, a return to earlier forms of slapstick, gross-out humor, and smartly written one-liners, very much in the tradition of its predecessor, yet imbued with a flair for the surreal that only a contemporary film helmed by an SNL alum (Akiva Schaffer) could. It would be pathetic to reproduce some of its expertly delivered lines here. But to give one a taste of its unrestrained humor, the film’s most infectiously funny moments include Liam Neeson discarding a car windshield only to drive directly into a perfectly intact one, sexual pantomime with a dog as viewed through infrared binoculars, a Digital Short-style confrontation with a sentient snowman, a physics-defying beat ‘em up finale, casual (and scatalogical) police brutality, a running coffee gag, and everything with Pamela Anderson. Leslie Nielsen would be proud — this one isn’t aging any time soon. — TYLER THIER

Every year needs its odd little Paul Schrader film that’s not Master Gardener. And while the “outsider cinema” of Joel Potrykus — known for making ultra-low-budget, grungy cult classics like The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) and Relaxer (2018) — would seem like an odd fit for the “God’s Lonely Man” cinema canon, his latest, less overtly off-putting effort, Vulcanizadora, absolutely does. It’s positioned as a sequel to his 2014 film, Buzzard (2014); a meditation of sorts on the consequences these two despicable, dirtbag men, Marty (Joshua Burge) and Derek (played by Potrykus himself), must deal with after they’ve committed the violent crimes they did in the 2014 film. The first 30 minutes of this 84-minute film are admittedly hard-going — Potrykus’ aggressively oddball performance as Derek is so insufferable that it’s borderline unbelievable why Burge’s stone-faced Marty hasn’t already disposed of him in the most violent way possible. But gradually, and then quite suddenly, what felt like an unbearable variation on Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy becomes the most distressful, borderline sickening thing this writer has watched since the finale of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). Except here, it’s the centerpiece sequence — not only minutely detailed, but also elongated for an excruciatingly tense 25 minutes. What follows this nerve-shreddingly tense sequence, however, is really what makes the film so hauntingly memorable. Potrykus wisely closes up on Burge’s hollowed-out face, making it a canvas of masculine fragility, guilt, and helplessness; his portrayal of Marty trying to live with his guilt in modern-day America is not of “God’s Lonely Man,” then, but simply of a lonely man, too tired and too incapable to even want to attempt to find any form of absolution or grace. — DHRUV GOYAL

Adam Curtis opens his blistering, bleak dissection of the original sins and continued crumbling of the British Empire with a scathing scene of noted child sex offender Jimmy Saville — basically, the UK’s showbiz Jeffrey Epstein — escorting a group of kids through a smirking Margaret Thatcher’s door. It’s just one of a few dozen fulcrum points Curtis delineates, all of course with perfectly calibrated archive footage and snide captioning (this one, as well as his previous film, has none of his trademark narration). It’s probably his most unsettled and hopeless work yet, even more so than It Felt Like a Kiss. Curtis has spent a lot of his career insisting that politicians have failed because they have given up on new paths, new systems, new ideas, and instead have either resorted to or fallen into old ways of control. But with Shifty, it seems like even he has at last given up on what normally passes for his optimism, that there’s any hope of finding the path forward that he’s insisted for years must be out there, in whatever form it will take. — MATT LYNCH

One of the decade’s more interesting cinematic projects thus far has been the three-film collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp: Kimi, Presence, and Black Bag, the most stylish and narratively sophisticated of the three. Black Bag caps off this unofficial triptych of modestly scaled genre exercises that revolve around surveillance as a central theme and which interweave contemporary social and political issues. Yet, because it works as more than a diverting experiment, Black Bag stands above the rest: an immaculately polished, star-driven vehicle for Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, the film is a sexy spy caper that is classical in its construction and sleekly modern in its aesthetic. Fassbender and Blanchett play George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, married intelligence agents who must delicately balance the existential demands of their work and their typically-idyllic marriage. They are cool and capable at work, while in their domestic lives, they share Nick and Nora’s loving monogamy and unparalleled hosting abilities, and echo Albee’s George and Martha in their zest for playing volatile psychological games on unsuspecting guests. Played by seasoned stars who know how to accentuate their charisma without breaking a sweat, George and Kathryn are among the most seductive protagonists in any film released this year, and are bolstered by a murderer’s row of appealing British actors who play colleagues with dubious motives. Its box office was perceived as a mild disappointment upon its release, but Black Bag’s pleasures, anchored in a casually confident craftsmanship that has grown increasingly rare lately, are the kind that persist. — ROBERT STINNER

The role of the doctor lends itself to diagnostic narratives. For a film that uses birth and abortion care to motivate a film expressly concerned with societal ethics, one could look at something like Mai Zetterling’s Doktor Glas, with its patient-journal narration and interest in possible outcomes. But for Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), the constantly working OB/GYN surgeon in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, the act of summing up requires a different kind of attention. Nina’s very existence, of which her decisions constitute just one part, is always being complicated. Despite her making calls in life-and-death situations, Nina’s power to act is severely limited; even inside the institution’s walls she privileges patient needs over laws, working undercover with seemingly only a secondary desire for self-preservation. Which is why it is ultimately of more significance that the film is an investigation into what Nina, an anomaly in the system, sees. Is the camera a protective screen that pushes through space, compressing it into work-time increments in a way almost as extroverted as in the back-and-forth truck section of Michael Snow’s Presents? Is it a video-game inspired POV mechanism? Is it a way of seeing a theatricalization of life, in which an impermeable, feature-distorted humanoid creature overlaps with the visual place of Nina? Can it, as it does during the near-operatic storm sequence, pull out to an objective plane, in which one could witness, as Nina might hope to, everything without interference? By the time it adopts another mode — a variation on Ozu’s eye-line-matched, pleasantry-filled shot-reverses — near its end, it’s clear that Kulumbegashvili has little interest in merely copying available models. By moving between states — some embodied, some mechanical, and no total alignment between the two imposed — no other film this year looks anything like this. “There is no space for anyone in my life,” Nina says. Kulumbegashvili’s approaches create an overwhelmingly dense field of information, but at the same time she isolates and maps out a way to see a devastatingly clear portrait, of how an individual mastery of time and profession creates both subjective and objective oppositions. — MICHAEL SCOULAR