The Best Films of 2025 (Keith's List)

Well, we made it. 2025 was not an easy year for many reasons, including (to keep the focus on film) a sense that top-down change in the film world will continue to narrow what sort of movies get made and make their way into theaters. And yet, to paraphrase a famous cinematic mathematician/chaotician, the movies continued to, uh, find a way in 2025. Enough great films made it over the many, many hurdles standing in their way to make carving out a best-of list a challenge, even one that stretches to 15. Some have been locks since I first saw them, but I’m guessing several titles on my honorable mentions could easily make the leap to the top ranks if I revisited them in the future. If 2026 has such an abundance, we’ll be lucky.

15. The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold)
Mona Fastvold has talked about the difficulty she had getting The Testament of Ann Lee made and it’s not hard to understand why. An historical drama about the Shakers, a sex-eschewing Christian sect famed for their austerity? And it’s also a musical? That’s not the easiest sell. Yet, like last year’s The Brutalist (which Fastvold co-wrote with director Brady Corbet, who serves as co-writer here), the film offers a stark, haunting vision of American history from the perspective of some of the outcasts who shaped it. And, like the Shakers, the beautifully staged film benefits from a charismatic leader, thanks to Amanda Seyfried’s magnetic work as the messianic title character.

14. Predators (dir. David Osit)
An in-depth but straightforward look at To Catch a Predator, the NBC news program built around “gotcha” scenes of men caught in the act of seeking sex with underage partners, might be fascinating enough given the show’s dubious ethics and not-so-long-ago cultural ubiquity. But Osit’s film goes even further, placing the show’s success within a broader context and exploring its lasting impact, and its role in the director’s own life, before bringing it back to the source. It’s a revealing, appropriately uncomfortable film that asks uncomfortable questions that have only grown more resonant with time.

13. Eephus (dir. Carson Lund)
In Carson Lund’s funny, elegiac directorial debut, a seemingly meaningless contest between two Massachusetts recreation league baseball teams on a late-summer day some time in 1991 slowly reveals itself as an emblem of how time passes everyone by. Lund stocks the cast with scruffy, out-of-shape competitors whose glory days, such as they were, are long behind them. They’relaying because that’s just what you do on a field whose imminent destruction means they might never play again. They’re not exactly raging against the dying of the light, but that doesn’t mean they’ll pack it in before it’s truly been extinguished.

12. The Secret Agent (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)
A dissident professor who’s run afoul of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1977, Armando (Wagner Moura) is a man with an uncertain future, a past he doesn’t fully understand, and a present that feels like a dead end. The title of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film suggests action and intrigue—which it has—but it’s even more concerned with Armando’s experiences living in a place that’s largely denied his right to exist and to live as he wants from birth. It’s a time capsule of a moment in history that would be dangerous to forget, and tragic to repeat.

11. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. Rian Johnson)
Rian Johnson’s 2019 Knives Out tapped into a long-unserved need for smart whodunits and colorful sleuths while also understanding that the best mysteries also serve as trojan horses for larger concerns. That’s remained true through both sequels, including Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, which emerges as the series’ best entry thanks to a soulful performance from Josh O’Connor as an idealistic priest with a troubled past, strong work from another star-packed supporting cast, and a a sincere interest in the ways religion can elevate or denigrate the soul, depending on who’s standing in the pulpit.

10. Father Mother Sister Brother (dir. Jim Jarmusch)
Jim Jarmusch retreats from the despairing comedy of The Dead Don’t Die for an inspired triptych of family stories involving siblings, parents, and afternoon meetings. Seemingly nothing of real consequence happens in each segment—whose stars include Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Charlotte Rampling, and Cate Blanchett—yet each reveals the sometimes unplumbed depths of the relationships between parents and their children with a deadpan, bittersweet wistfulness unimaginable from any other filmmaker.

9. The Mastermind (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
The full irony at work in the title of Kelly Reichardt’s latest doesn’t reveal itself until The Mastermind’s final stretch. Yes, J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor again) thinks of himself as the smartest guy in any room until a seemingly can’t-miss art heist goes awry and upends his life. But it’s when J.B. goes on the lam that it becomes clear just how out-of-touch he’s become with the rapidly changing America of the early 1970s, where the counterculture he used to brush shoulders with has either hardened or retreated to the margins and dropping out can’t guarantee escape.

8. Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater)
Both Eephus and Blue Moon create a sense of history passing their protagonists by, a feeling also found in abundance in Blue Moon, one of two Richard Linklater films released within weeks of each other this fall. (The second, Nouvelle Vague, made my list of honorable mentions.) Ethan Hawke plays songwriter Lorenz Hart, who holds court at the bar in Sardi’s until the arrival of his once and possibly future partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), who’s celebrating the premiere of Oklahoma!, his first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein III. Blue Moon unfolds across a single night and is set almost entirely in one location, but it captures the richness and contradictions of its brilliant and infuriating subject with a haunting thoroughness that more sweeping biopics struggle to achieve.

7. Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie)
No one except Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) expects the world to bow down in awe at the achievements of a table tennis champ, no matter how talented. But Marty’s belief is so strong, and his confidence so seemingly bottomless, that he acts as if it can bend the world to his way of thinking, no matter how many lies he has to tell or who gets hurt in the process. Watching Josh Safdie’s first solo feature is akin to the experience of being one of Marty’s marks. It’s so easy to get bowled over by the film’s charisma and energy that Marty’s toxic qualities, and the consequences of his actions, feel almost like afterthoughts. That, however, feels like part of the point of this portrait of a rascal exploring just how far his charm can take him before he’s dragged back down to earth with those he’s left behind. So does this: When you consider the forces standing in Marty’s way, and the figure who emerges as the film’s true villain, how can you not root for him?

6. It Was Just an Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)
It Was Just an Accident is at once (another) act of defiance against a repressive regime and confirmation that Jafar Panahi is one of the greatest living filmmakers. It’s also a sneakily weird film that somehow blurs the line between a tense thriller and a band-of-misfits comedy via the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasser), a former political prisoner who’s (maybe) found a way to turn the tables on the man who tortured him in prison. The irrepressible humanity Panahi finds in the situation makes the hammer blow of the final scenes hit that much harder.

5. Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier)
It was a good year for films depicting how art can provide expression for profound feelings that flawed artists seemingly cannot face head-on in their real lives. (See #3 below for another example.) In Joachim Trier’s follow-up to The Worst Person in the World, Stellan Starsgård plays Gustav, a revered but struggling director who attempts to recruit his daughter Nora (Renata Reinsve), an acclaimed actress, to star in a film drawn from their own family’s past. Her refusal forces both characters and those around them to contemplate the legacy of their troubled history—and the ways it’s entwined with Norway’s past through generations of change—and allows Trier to craft another moving study of characters attempting to understand where they came from and where they want to go next.

4. Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)
Even before the sun sets and Sinners reveals itself as a vampire movie, it’s clear that Ryan Coogler has made one of the year’s richest films. Set in and around Clarksdale, Mississippi during the Great Depression, the film creates a meticulously realized world where music flows from churches and train station platforms and cultures overlap, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in harmony. The bloodsuckers get folded into what’s already a fascinating tale of music, religion, social stratification, history, loss, PTSD, and racial inequality—all of it tied to the difficult homecoming of the Smokestack Twins (Michael B. Jordan, playing a double role), a pair of local gangsters returning from their time in Chicago’s gangland to a childhood home containing dangers both old, new, and immortal. 

3. Hamnet (dir. Chloe Zhao)
Some of the most striking images in Chloe Zhao’s filmography involve figures placed in vast landscapes, a trend that remains true literally and figuratively in Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Like the source material, Zhao places the lives of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Anne (called “Agnes” here and played by Jessie Buckley) in the broader context of provincial Elizabethan England, where the divide between town and country remains thin and a glover’s son with literary aspirations might fall for a woman who had not yet severed all ties to the older, pre-Christian world. The film’s imagining of their marriage and the loss that seems to have, at the least, inspired the name of the protagonist of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy is, of course, fanciful, but the cast (Buckley above all) and Zhao’s commitment to pulling back and considering the wider world surrounding her characters make it feel heartbreakingly real.

2. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Could anyone but Paul Thomas Anderson have made a film in which stoner humor and a deep concern with the future of America live so effortlessly side by side? Could anyone but a shambling Leonardo DiCaprio have portrayed Gen X’s abandoned ideals (and possible redemption) so well? Could anyone but newcomer Chase Infiniti have embodied a dogged hope for the future? Could anyone but Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn have done, well, what they do? A film seemingly made for our present moment, Anderson’s loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland felt like an instant all-timer from the moment it premiered.

1. Train Dreams (dir. Clint Bentley)
When I finished watching Train Dreams via screener as part of my coverage of last year’s Sundance, I found myself thinking it would be a pretty great year if I saw a better movie in 2025. I think 2025 was a pretty great year (at least in terms of producing good movies, if no other way) yet nothing ended up displacing Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella set along remote edges of a rapidly changing 20th century Pacific Northwest. Without veering too far from the original narrative, Bentley’s Malick-inspired film softens some of the harder edges of the source material, a choice that might stray from the author’s vision but makes room for Joel Edgerton’s deeply moving performance as a man trying to make sense of an existence in which loss and cruelty mingle freely with beauty and connection.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): Superman, Pavements, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, No Other Choice, Peter Hujar’s Day, The Perfect Neighbor, The Phoenician Scheme, Nouvelle Vague, Weapons, A House of Dynamite, The Baltimorons, Souleymane’s Story, Teenage Wasteland, Frankenstein, The Shrouds, The Naked Gun, Sound of Falling, Mickey 17, Warfare, The Long Walk, and Sorry, Baby.

Performance of the Year: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Even before Hamnet hits its final scenes—which, naturally, are best left unspoiled—Buckley has created one of the year’s best performances by shaping Hamnet’s Agnes into a character as, well, strong-willed as her husband Will and playing her as a woman who understands that the world’s joys invite the potential for heartbreak. By the film’s final, unforgettable moments, she no longer needs words to signal what Agnes is feeling, we’ve come to know her so well.

Scene of the Year: The roof is on fire, Sinners
You go to movies hoping that, every once in a while, you’ll see something that will make your jaw drop. The musical sequence in Sinners, in which past, present, and future merge together and a Mississippi roadhouse because a locus for global music history over the course of one seamless shot, is one such moment. It’s perfectly paced yet I never wanted it to end.

Reason for Hope: It Was Just an Accident
Even putting aside the film’s artistic merits, which are considerable, the mere existence of It Was Just an Accident, or any Jafar Panahi film, is a testament to art’s ability to take a stand against the forces that would suppress it. Panahi’s been imprisoned more than once for his continued habit of making movies that question the authority of the Iranian government. Meanwhile, the artistic climate of the ostensible free world seems to grow increasingly timid in the face of authoritarianism. (I guess I snuck a reason for despair into my reason for hope, but such are the times in which we live).

Reason for Despair: The Future of Warner Bros. (And What It Means in the Grand Scheme of Things)
We are currently rooting for Netflix—the corporation that often seems hellbent on destroying the institution of movie theaters whose streaming service treats Roma and Love is Blind are treated as equally valuable pieces of content—to purchase Warner Bros. Why? Because the other option is Paramount, the corporation that’s transformed CBS News into a state-approved media organ virtually overnight. What nightmares will corporate consolidation bring next? Stay tuned.

Most Anticipated film of 2026:The Odyssey 
What could be more exciting than Christopher Nolan giving the full Nolan treatment to Homer’s tale of gods, monsters, and dangerous naval journeys? Nothing, unless someone makes a film about sheep who attempt to solve a murder. What’s that you say? Someone did?!?