Surprise! I’m back. Maybe. In an effort to inspire myself to write more frequently and creatively and passionately, I have resolved in this new year to resurrect the old blog. So here I am with a list of my favorite films of 2025.
As always, with these sorts of lists, I can only speak for the films I actually viewed. In past years, I put off making a list until I felt like I had seen everything noteworthy. Since I have not published a “favorites of the year” list since 2020, you can tell how that attitude turned into a procrastination tactic. So I begin with this caveat: my movie watching habits have been pretty confined this year. I use my AMC A-List pass to go to the cinema a couple of times a month by myself after my kids are asleep. It’s a good system for me; I’m happy to have seen as much as I have this year. I would not say I had a particularly adventurous year at the movies, but I still saw a healthy number of films that jazzed me. Some of these movies brought me joy. Some turned me on, some made me cackle, and some forced me to watch through my hands in discomfort. Some took my breath away with their beauty. Some reflected and refracted my own experiences, while others provided escape or a radically different perspective. It’s eclectic; it’s my taste.*
I put this list together in the spirit of sharing, and, as such, I would love for the sharing to go both ways! I turned off comments for the blog, because AI bots were making them unusable, but I trust that you’ll find a way to tell me your favorites of 2025. (Let’s get old school and email.)
Without further ado, here are my 10 favorite films of 2025, listed in alphabetical order because I avoid ranking things whenever possible.
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Director James Griffiths, along with co-stars and screenwriters Tim Key and Tom Basden, expanded their 2007 short film The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island into one of my surprise favorites of the year. Films like this often get described as “gentle,” and I suppose that’s true in so far as nothing sensational happens and every character lands on their feet by the end. But The Ballad of Wallis Island is a film that’s all about letting go of the past, and there’s nothing gentle about that. For a film with such an annoying, twee trailer, I was startled by the level of emotional honesty that Ballad ultimately goes for. It’s funny, warm, and real.
Black Bag
In Black Bag‘s very first scene, someone wryly accuses counterintelligence officer George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) of “flagrant monogamy.” The line, tossed off as a joke, turns out to be the key to the film’s entire espionage plot about a pair of married spies who may or may not be hiding something from one another. Steven Soderbergh, working from a tightly-paced script by David Koepp, returns to sleek Ocean’s Eleven form with this enjoyably talky ensemble piece. Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomi Harris, and Regé-Jean Page round out the quintet of suspects (including his wife Kathryn) whom George has been tasked with investigating after a major intelligence leak. It’s great fun trying to figure out the identity of the mole, but the film’s best trick might be how cleverly it makes George and Kathryn’s commitment to each other feel so deliciously subversive.
Die My Love
I think I’m worrying everyone to whom I recommend this film. I wrote more about Lynne Ramsay’s latest here, for High Femme’s best of 2025 post (which is worth a read in its entirety, by the way).
Father Mother Sister Brother
Jim Jarmusch strikes again with his newest, an anthology film in three parts. Each vignette captures a family reunion. The first follows a pair of siblings as they visit their semi-estranged father, the second a pair of siblings as they visit their semi-estranged mother, and the third a pair of twin siblings as they clean out their recently deceased parents’ apartment. The distinct dynamics of each family play out slowly, subtly, and truthfully. While the short films are not connected substantively, recurring motifs tie them together cosmically. A formally rigorous and beautifully acted film that makes space for all of the silences between family members.
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a long-gestating passion project for the director, is not a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Del Toro retains the narrative structure of the source material while swapping his own thematic preoccupations for Shelley’s. The resulting film is a rendition of the story that only del Toro could make, a gorgeously Gothic meditation on bad parents, religious guilt, venture capitalists, and misunderstood monsters. Jacob Elordi gives a revelatory performance as an ultra-sympathetic version of the monster; but Oscar Isaac is just as good, navigating a thornier interpretation of the doctor, which keeps this two-hander feeling even. A Frankenstein to make your heart ache.
Mickey 17
Full disclosure: I would love this film for Nasha (Naomi Ackie) alone. She’s my kind of freak, an extremely capable heroine with a horny streak a mile wide. But the whole movie surrounding her worked for me, too. Of all the films this year that attempted relevant political satire, I found Mickey 17‘s band of white nationalist, evangelical grifters the most compelling. Desperate to escape a loan shark who’s after him on Earth, Mickey (Robert Pattinson, making his second appearance on this list) volunteers to join a colonization mission, run by said grifters, to outer space. To secure a highly sought-after spot on the ship, he impulsively agrees to be an “expendable” laborer. Mickey essentially signs his life away, legally relinquishing the rights to his own DNA so that he can be cloned every time he dies doing some horrible task on the mission. And, trust me, Mickey dies some pretty grisly deaths. With his follow-up to Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s back in Snowpiercer and Okja mode, making bizarre, goofy, big-swing sci-fi that’s either going to really do it for you or really not. It really did it for me.
Oh, Hi!
If you’re looking for the best “what’s up with the straights” movie of 2025, it’s not Celine Song’s Materialists. It’s Sophie Brooks’ loopy Oh, Hi! But, to be fair, I’m not going to not like a movie where Logan Lerman spends the majority of the runtime tied up naked in bed. (Lest I’ve been too glib, I do want to shout out Molly Gordon here, who has now co-written and co-starred in two of my favorite comedies of the last five years. If you haven’t seen Theater Camp, get on that. It’s delightful.)
One Battle After Another
Just an exhilarating movie-going experience, formally and thematically, from Paul Thomas Anderson. Maybe I’ll have something more eloquent to say about it once I watch it again, but for now I will simply add my voice to the ongoing chorus of praise.
Twinless
Dylan O’Brien’s ass dominated the conversation around this film, and rightly so. It’s nice, and he bares it twice, as two different characters. (I’m sure he’s so happy that Connor Storrie showed up just in the nick of time to steal 2025’s Most-Talked-About Ass of the Year award.)** But more than that, this movie actually is about how one glimpse of Dylan O’Brien’s naked butt drives a person crazy. When Roman (O’Brien) loses his twin Rocky (also O’Brien, in flashback), he attends a support group for twins whose twin siblings have died. There, he meets Dennis (writer/director James Sweeney), and the two men strike up a friendship born of shared grief. Twinless manages a tough tonal balance, expertly filtering the plot of an erotic thriller—or at least the set up of one—through the aesthetic sensibilities of a ’10s indie dramedy to create something uniquely sensitive. O’Brien gives one of my favorite performances of the year as Roman/Rocky, and, in a just world, his would be the twin performance with awards heat.
Wake Up Dead Man
I didn’t grow up extremely religious, but my family did go to church every Sunday at the behest of my mom. In the last decade, even she has stopped attending. She’s taken to saying that the church left her. I couldn’t think of anything but my mom as I watched the ideological battle between Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor, so damn good as usual) and Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) unfold in Wake Up Dead Man. I think if there were more Christian leaders like Duplenticy and fewer like Wicks, my mom would still be going to church.
Honorable Mentions
As a Hannibal devotee, of course I ran to see Dust Bunny as soon as it came out. Writer/director Bryan Fuller did not disappoint, delivering a whimsically gruesome monster movie and giving star Mads Mikkelsen a role perfectly suited to his talents (in an entirely different way than he did on Hannibal, might I add, because Mads has quite the array of talents). Dust Bunny narrowly missed my top ten, but I’d still recommend it.
Akiva Shaffer’s The Naked Gun remake tickled my fancy and sated the stupid comedy enthusiast within me. I don’t think anything made me laugh quite as hard this year as the ludicrously extended Jack Frost riff in the middle of this film. Pamela Anderson instantly earned a spot on my mental list of deadpan comedy legends after this one.
I suppose Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is the elephant in the room here, seeing as I co-hosted a vampire movie podcast for years. I enjoyed it, and I will always rejoice to see an ambitious, original movie for adults become such a critical and financial success. I’m positively gleeful that a sexy vampire movie now holds the record for most-nominated movie ever at the Oscars. But, despite multiple watches, Sinners remains a movie that I like a lot but don’t love with my whole heart.
For television, I’ve been just as obsessed with Heated Rivalry as everyone else. It actually inspired me to revisit the draft of what was supposed to be the third part of the “I believe in softcore pornography…” series for this blog, which was about Hollywood’s dismal track record of adapting erotic romance novels. (It started life as a rant and a half about Bridgerton season two, which pissed me off more than you can possibly imagine.) I finished the essay and published it elsewhere; but if you are interested, you can read it here! Maybe I’ll finally complete the Channing Tatum-centric part two of the series one day. There’s hope for all of your unfinished drafts, my friends.
Last but not least, count me in as a fan of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus.
*I am on Letterboxd (under the username l_carlsondownie), if you’re curious about what I saw that didn’t make the list. I don’t review anything; I just log what I watch. If you want to know what I thought was wildly overrated this year, I’ll tell you here and save you the trouble: 28 Years Later and Marty Supreme, both films I really, really wanted to love made by people I usually dig.
**I also totally forgot that François Arnaud appears briefly in this film until I was writing this mini-review—Heated Rivalry reference #2 for anyone counting.