Best Films of 2025: #20–11

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.

Like Eraserhead in a more naturalistic, albeit no less upsetting milieu, only told from a female perspective, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You poses the disquieting question: “What if I resented the existence of my own sick child?” A pitch black comedy-cum-feature-length panic attack, Bronstein presents motherhood as a form of extreme tunnel vision where all other needs and wants — professional success, personal gratification, hygiene, happiness — are of tertiary concern as one’s life is given over to caring for an ungrateful little monster who’s seemingly fighting against their very well-being. Employing one of the more conceptually audacious conceits in ages, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You consigns said small child to offscreen for nearly the entire film, reducing one’s own offspring — and with them, one’s hopes for the future — to a disembodied voice constantly asking for things and refusing to do what they’re told. In the performance of the year, Rose Byrne’s Linda endures a series of quotidian indignities and self-inflicted wounds that snowball in the absence of her husband — who primarily exists as a distracted, unsympathetic voice on the other end of the phone — or seemingly anyone else willing to meet her halfway or give her a goddamn break; even the parking attendant at her kid’s doctor is up her ass. With the camera’s unforgiving lens trained on Byrne’s prematurely aged face, serving as a roadmap of wrinkles, oily skin, and bags under her eyes, the actress spins up a symphony of exasperation and barely constrained rage with the film’s aggressive sound design emphasizing every disgusting, squishy, damp, or squealing noise imaginable when turning your life over to looking after something that grew inside you. Kind of like a tumor. Call your mother after you watch this and apologize. She’ll know what for. — ANDREW DIGNAN

The narrative drive of It Was Just An Accident, Jafar Panahi’s first film since his imprisonment and the lifting of his government-issued ban from filmmaking, centers Vahid, a car mechanic who kidnaps and contemplates killing a man whom, he is pretty sure, tortured him in prison years ago. The choice in front of him presents a classic moral dilemma — at least, one might assume. But Panahi, for all the moralizing opportunities this literal life-or-death premise affords him, isn’t actually interested in parsing them out. To help wrestle him out of his doubt over the man’s identity, Vahid wrangles together a group of prison comrades, familiar and not, for their input. They never reach a consensus over whether to kill this man, or even whether this is their man in the first place. Their hemming and hawing revolves more around personal cost and the realities of justice than the rights and wrongs of ultimate revenge. Will killing him be worth the potential fallout? Can they not just move on? What is the price of doing so, when others are still tortured inside the regime’s prisons? Despite the gang’s occasional bloodthirsty outbursts, Panahi never shortchanges their humanity — especially when it would be the easy choice. The result is a serio-comic tale of deceptively simple construction: long stretches of impassioned speech, furious argument, and nerve-tightening atmosphere. This may be Panahi’s most traditionally accessible film in over a decade, but it’s not at the expense of pointed, political fury. A second prison sentence issued during the film’s theatrical rollout is proof his battle isn’t over. — CHRIS CASSINGHAM

After hitting the jackpot with their gambling addiction Sandler vehicle Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers called it Splitsville and divvied up their winnings, only to return to the screen each on their own in 2025 to show us what cards they individually brought to the table. Benny revealed that he’s always been the melancholy one (his Mark Kerr biopic The Smashing Machine unfairly dismissed), but Josh’s Marty Supreme proves he’s the one with a hurtling sense of narrative propulsion and a keen eye for Weird New York. Drenched in writer-editor-producer Ronald Bronstein’s sweat-soaked, puss-filled secret sauce, it’s at once productively in conversation with Uncut Gems and something of a rehash: it ping-pongs between the same half-cocked swindles, rollercoaster mood swings, and pitter-patter, Altman-esque dialogue, calcifying the Uncut Gems formula and affixing it to the postwar milieu. Yet there are enough surprises (including terrific production design from Jack Fisk) to differentiate it as a uniquely thrilling interrogation of Jewishness in American life. Marty Mauser is a Crumb character in all but name, and Safdie charts the sudden atomic explosion of a new kind of American Judaism at the dawn of the ‘50s on Chalamet’s unibrow-ensconced, acne-scarred face. Brazen, sexually promiscuous, and defiantly individualistic, Marty is the first postmodern Jew, racing at ludicrous speed away from the country’s superego and toward its pure, uninhibited id. Marty Supreme is only one tiny Magen David in the grand constellation of American Jews at the movies, but it burns brighter than any other has in quite some time. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

28 Days Later revolutionized the formal possibilities of the zombie narrative. The camera was restless, invasive, the visual imprint overexposed and alienating. Danny Boyle’s cinematic touch was unashamedly present. 28 Weeks Later was different, with lower-tier blockbuster plastered all over its cinematography, soundtrack, CGI-tinged set pieces, and edgy dialogue. A directorial signature as forceful as Boyle’s was absent, but it was still fun in its own right. 28 Years Later is better than both of them combined. It’s a radical piece of filmmaking that innovates the visual grammar of horror beyond the original, adopting what can only be described as a porous aesthetic; a 1903 anti-war poem scores blood-red night vision imagery, while our protagonists navigate a treacherous landscape, interspersed with footage of war marches, clips from Henry V (1944), and something horrific emerging from the leaves further into the woods. It’s like the introduction of a new enemy in a video game, but with a montage of warrior archetypes to frame the father and son as hopelessly unprepared in both a physical and an ideological sense. Need I mention zombie dick? There’s lots of it. The infected are evolving and becoming more human-like in their behavior; they are communicating, giving birth, forming communities. The swells of Young Fathers’ breathtaking score, the almost artificially beautiful backdrops, the sharp turns in mood from terrifying to goofy to devastating, the sudden appearance of a cult that models itself off a notorious British pedophile — it all adds up to the feeling that this is not a cash grab, nor is it insular to the horror genre. It bears heart, conscience, dissent. 28 Years Later knows it’s not just one of the best films of the year, but one of the most dangerous. — TYLER THIER

Another genre mutant from the master of them — a film and a filmmaker that resist definition at every turn, with every film. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud is many things: late capitalist satire; Hitchcockian, dread-inducing suspense; an inverted French morality play; a Western that ends at the OK Corral. And putting a bow on these myriad dovetailing identities is the film’s third act NOS rush, which is all the way up there with the greatest sequences in a great year in film: a bravura, expertly mapped, white-knuckle shootout that reveals, in his fourth decade as a filmmaker, that the 70-year-old director has yet another tool in that bottomless bag of his. It would be easy to lump Cloud in with a spate of class parables that have arrived over the past decade, some of which you will find on this list, but the film is more subtle than all of them, refuses to telegraph its ideas for the audience, and as a result leaves the viewer with little to hold onto but ambiguity and discomfort in a world gone to shit, which is the only real signature you can ascribe to the director/chimera otherwise known as Kiyoshi Kurosawa. — ABE BEAME

Just as the ancients saw the world as a gaping mass of contingency onto which they imposed the language of necessity, we moderns bear witness to the sense of an end that’s always arrived and knows no beginning. The apocalypse, as we know it, is an eternal affair: both the permanent state of exception naturalized in an order whose safeguard we call the law, and the literal realization of survivorship bias in the trauma accrued through generations. Yet apocalyptic events are not without chronology; they play out as death, destruction, and grotesquerie amid thuddingly historical stages. Historically, the desert foretells life for the deserving, while it equally preludes the path of anonymity away from the riches and iniquities of civilization. For Óliver Laxe’s Sirât, neither reading prevails nor even necessarily holds. The film’s pretensions are easily discerned in its markers of New Age spirituality, thrown unceremoniously into a cacophony of bodies and beats, the persistence of humanity against the scornful scorching of the heat. No eternity calls, only rumors of the next rave; individuality isn’t stripped bare so much as it is repeatedly brutalized and made anew on the crags and plains of some unending Saharan expanse. Since these are pretensions, Sirât flaunts them to their fullest, in a desperate expression of the unrepresentable throes of life. The first civilizations straddled this same path — “narrower than a strand of hair and sharper than a sword” — as the last ones. Collapse and creation, no matter in what order, are both certain. — MORRIS YANG

Asked with extreme affection: have any films ever swung so wildly between freak fantasizing incomprehensibility and singular, thudding clarity as James Cameron’s Avatar sequels? The engine behind Cameron’s art — his precise internal metronome, his instinct for when to push and when to paint — remains intact, even as the narrative and religio-cosmic implications of Pandora’s universe intensify past the point of human understanding. This is the simplest story lettered with the most unhomely beauty. A son has died in wartime, amid brutal occupation and ecological decimation. A family must mourn him in motion, even as countless other bodies fall around them. These circumstances should not seem alien to the spectator watching in 2025 AD. Cameron has always positioned science-fiction as the device most able to process the liquid cruelties of humanity on the fly, mixed in, perversely, with all the pleasures cheap thrills promise. Avatar has simply provided him with the best “is/isn’t” literal configuration of cinema’s constant navigation through the real; the only way to truly resolve the eternal contradiction or representative art — the images are only ever the images, the images always stand for something — is to shoot to see simply. The accusation against these films has always been that they seek reduction in the face of the totalizing discombobulation of modernity. This judgment mistakes the clarity of Cameron’s lines for something like patronizing incuriosity. It assumes that his equivalent affections for the pure love exchanged between family surrogates and shoot-em-up techno-spectacle seeks to resolve these seemingly opposite notions rather than put them into often a productive, often confusing conversation. Rather than stripmine for polemic its provocations around settler colonialism, insurgence amid imperialism, and the ways these deeply human forces shape our perceptions of race and gender, Avatar collects all its concerns — literal, material, and deeply subconscious — in its every frame. Fire and Ash especially whorls and tilts Pandora past the one-to-one symbolisms of (ahem) avatar logic. Herein you will find: a court council of whales decked in marine drapery, a psychotronic seduction sequence more like an Infected Mushroom video than T2, the evolution of Kiri (Sigourney Weaver’s avatar’s clone daughter) from merely maybe-messianic to actually gnostic. Climbing through howling dream winds toward a ghostlight always off-screen, she nearly bursts into “Gethsemene.” Fire and Ash pleasures itself in its speculations, many of which are purely, merely weird. Ultimately, it is not making points about how we live, then, so much as it is melding points of how we don’t with how we’re dying. — FRANK FALISI

If he wanted, Bi Gan is the sort of director who could easily rest his feet on a bag of party tricks. 2018’s Long Day’s Journey into Night ends with a 59-minute, unbroken shot rendered in 3D, one of this century’s most breathtaking technical achievements. Resurrection follows suit: it again features a mind-boggling single shot — this time, at 35 minutes, including an overnight timelapse — preceded by segments of German expressionist pastiche, gumshoe French noir, Spielbergian melodrama, and new-millennium nihilism. Gan’s style is as mercurial as it is masterful, and he takes the whole of 20th-century cinema as a palette. But Resurrection is too thematically rich to be reduced to its formal triumphs. Over six chapters (divided according to the six senses of Buddhist experience), Gan constructs a world in which humans have discovered that sacrificing the capacity to dream can grant immortality. Those who dissent, labeled here as Deliriants, outcast themselves from both physical and societal health. The pursuant questions — Do we carry desire as a burden? Are dreams and art and desire a reprieve from corporeal form? — remain without answer. Instead, Gan trades in the language of the dreamers before him (from Maya Deren to David Lynch to Tarkovsky, Murnau, and Kobayashi) to map modern China, modern film, and the postmodern dilemma of a dying dream. What might seem like the death of cinema could reveal itself to be its birth, its archive of longings inextinguishable. — CHRISTIAN CRAIG

The vagaries of non-blockbuster film distribution being what they are, when I was assigned the task of writing about Eephus, one of my favorite films of 2024, for this Best Films of 2025 list, it had been well over a year since I had last watched it. So I pulled out my copy of the deluxe Blu-ray edition and roped in my son — a 12-year-old baseball fanatic who spends six days a week practicing the game and has watched a fair number of baseball movies in his off-time, though not yet this one — to watch it with me. He liked it quite a bit, he says. “It’s better than The Natural.” He liked the characters, the way they drank beer and joked with each other. He laughed pretty consistently through the first half of the movie, the biggest guffaws coming from the line, “Well, every great defensive play starts with really shitty pitching.” He didn’t think the actors’ baseball-playing was all that great, and as a pitcher, he had particular trouble with their throwing mechanics. But he did allow that they did pretty well for a bunch of “45-, 50-, 60-year-old guys drinking beer.” In particular, he loved the feel the movie has for the game, the look of the field and the sky in the morning, through the day, and into the night. It captured for him the same feeling he gets in brisk early mornings during warmups, as well as what it’s like to play after the sun goes down, when the world is telling you to pack it in and head for home, but you gotta throw just one more pitch, take one more at-bat, field another couple of grounders. He also likes that the Blu-ray comes with a set of baseball cards. And that’s really all there is to it, I’d say. Baseball is life. Life is baseball. Hit ‘em where they ain’t. — SEAN GILMAN

Another year passes, another list is sourced and tallied, and once again, another Hong Sang-soo film occupies its rightful place upon it. This time it is By the Stream, which assumes its place among the 20 best films of the year, marking the tenth time a Hong film (among a total of 12 features) has appeared on end-of-year lists since InRO’s inception. The natural inclination here for Hong obsessives is to rank and weigh merits, but a full consideration of such matters lies well beyond the remit of the task of this writing, not least for a director previously given the retrospective treatment by the outlet’s writers. Setting such considerations aside, then, By the Stream stands apart from much of Hong’s recent run by dint of being, at least superficially, rather unadorned in terms of temporal games, formal experiments, narrative sleight of hand, or efforts in dream logics. Instead, here, the director could be trying to approach a kind of event horizon that lies between art and life and where imitation between the two begins. The staples of a “Hong Sang-soo” film are all present — i.e., drinking, smoking, and reckless conversational gambits — but new amongst this is an uncanniness that structures the work’s overall uneventfulness, photography, and behaviors. So stripped down has the director’s form become that it is blocking alone — say, for example, in a turned back — that signals a breach in the shroud of indiscernibility cast upon the line between the work and life itself. Indeed, where another Hongian staple identifies itself, the repetitions and returns, their appearance is one reworked in the fashion of this immanence, the titular stream indicating the similar yet different experiences a substance undergoes at various stages of progression. In all this, the plainness of the construction is essential, one indicative of a subtlety experienced by all daily as lives meet and pass by one another, gaining less or more in the contrast. Such is this rigor that when the “that scene” of the film occurs (one the year’s best, and among Hong’s strongest) – wherein a director prompts a group of younger women to consider who they want to become, following an honest assessment of his own past – the thinness of formal difference between viewer and screen gives way with the seismic affective and conceptual shift, as the pressures of time collapse on a moment with a mere question. Few directors working today could draw so much out of so little, never mind so reflexively, which only speaks to the way in which any Hong film is a gift not to be taken for granted. Long may they continue. — MATT MCCRACKEN