2025 Recap – Best of the Rest (Part One)

TWENTY-FIVE MORE – Because I can (Part One)

11. Mickey 17 (Dir: Bong Joon Ho)

Wild, rambunctious, messy, and cheekily courageous sci-fi social commentary featuring a dynamic all-star cast, stellar set pieces, and the wickedly cutthroat observations of an always fearless Bong Joon Ho. Robert Pattinson is electrifying in a dual role as a pair of clones willing to do whatever it takes so they aren’t permanently erased from existence.

12. The Plague (Dir: Charlie Polinger)

Unflinching foray into the world of teenage competitive sports centered on the newest member of a water polo team and the constant hazing from their teammates that sends them into a downward psychological spiral. Newcomer Everett Blunck is outstanding, as is the always dynamic Joel Edgerton as the team’s determined coach who fails to take action when it’s needed the most.

13. Cloud (Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Brutally eloquent social satire from Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa about an e-commerce swindler who discovers the anonymity of an online existence isn’t all he believes it to be. Terrific action scenes, masterfully calibrated mean-spirited pitch-black comedy, and a thrilling layer of kinetic excess make this one as magnetically thrilling as it is tragically self-aware.

14. The Ugly Stepsister (Dir: Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt)

The Cinderella fairy tale gets twists inside and out (quite literally) in director Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt’s body-horror masterwork. Bloody, funny, and at times scary as hell, this intelligently fascinating slice of social commentary never lets up, everything building to a chaotically sublime climax of carnage that’s strangely beautiful and oddly empathetic — even with all of the amputations.

15. Hamnet (Dir: Chloé Zhao)

Jessie Buckley and youngster Jacobi Jupe deliver two of 2025’s most powerful performances in director Chloé Zhao’s emotional gut-punch of an adaptation of author Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling slice of speculative historical fiction involving the inspiration behind William Shakespeare’s (Paul Mescal) Hamlet. The last 15 minutes are nothing short of emotionally shattering perfection.

16. Predator: Badlands (Dir: Dan Trachtenberg)

Dan Trachtenberg’s third foray into the Predator-verse (2022’s Prey and this year’s animated winner Predator: Killer of Killers being the other two) is another success. This time, the story is told from the perspective of a young Predator, a runt whose pitiless father wanted dead, on a quest to bring home the skull of a fabled beast who supposedly cannot be killed and who lives on the most lethal planet in the universe. Elle Fanning captivates in a dual role as twin synthetics who both help and hinder our hero in his quest.

17. A Private Life (Dir: Rebecca Zlotowski)

A silly maybe-there’s-a-murder, maybe-there-is-not romp made sublime courtesy of two exquisite performances from Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil as a formerly married couple who reconnect when the former — an emotionally neutered therapist — comes to believe one of her patients was killed by her angrily duplicitous husband (Mathieu Amalric). A priceless gem chock-full of unexpected delights.

18. Eephus (Dir: Carson Lund)

One of the year’s best ensembles, with nary a familiar face amongst them, in a charming tale of a recreational baseball team dealing with all of life’s crazy, impenetrable mysteries on the last game day of the season (and also the final day of their league stadium’s existence). Questions of family, manhood, friendship, and sportsmanship are all explored in director Carson Lund’s beguiling dramedy.

19. Wake Up Dead Man (Dir: Rian Johnson)

Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig join forces for a third time with Wake Up Dead Man, another compellingly astute mystery that’s more concerned with analyzing current, socially-relevant hot-button issues than it is in revealing the identity of the person behind an “impossible” murder — and that’s exactly as it should be. Josh O’Connor shines as a young priest who finds he needs as much divine guidance as he does Benoit Blanc’s perceptively astute investigative skills.

20. Heart Eyes (Dir: Josh Ruben)

Unabashedly schmaltzy romantic comedy meets goofily gory holiday-themed slasher, and the result is a gruesomely hysterical, and unexpectedly intelligent, hybrid that also happens to be one of 2025’s most rewatchably amusing (and slathered in blood) confectionery treats. Mason Gooding and Olivia Holt prove to be so sexily entrancing as they evade — and later team up to bring down — a knife-wielding psychopath that if they became the horror-romcom go-to couple going forward I’d be all for it. [Interview with Josh Ruben]

21. Die My Love (Dir: Lynne Ramsay)

Jennifer Lawrence burns through the screen in Lynne Ramsay’s piercing, bleakly disquieting look at postpartum depression, marital discord, and mental deterioration, Die My Love. A tragic fable of motherhood and marriage spiraling like an unyielding cyclone into an unfathomable emotional abyss, this visually striking cinematic sojourn is like a rusty razor blade slowly slashed against the naked skin of a baby-smooth belly. It all hurts and leaves lasting scars, and that’s entirely by design.

22. Marty Supreme (Dir: Josh Safdie)

A never-better Timothée Chalamet sprints here and there in an anxiety-riddled examination of narcissism and determination run amok in Josh Safdie’s unyielding Marty Supreme, a sports-themed melodrama that hits the ground at a dead sprint and then only accelerates from there. Ping-Pong has never been this enthralling, or, for that matter, unforgiving.

23. The Wedding Banquet (Dir: Andrew Ahn)

As unnecessary as this remake of the 1993 Ang Lee classic may be, this update of The Wedding Banquet is nonetheless a constant source of euphoric joy. While the male half of this comedy of sexual identity and familial deception is perfectly fine, it is the Lesbian side of this comedically romantic coin that sends director Andrew Ahn and returning screenwriter James Schamus’s reimagining soaring into the stratosphere. Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran are superb.

24. KPop Demon Hunters (Dir: Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang)

The year’s most talked about, rewatched, and celebrated animated musical adventure lives up to the hype. I intoxicating balance of stellar songs, crisp action scenes, incisive writing, and lushly eye-popping visuals, I’d go so far as to call KPop Demon Hunters “Golden” if to do so weren’t so gosh darn obvious. Let’s just say it’s one of 2025’s best instead.

25. Is This Thing On? (Dir: Bradley Cooper)

More drama than comedy, Bradley Cooper’s psychoanalysis of a stand-up newbie trying to work through his marital difficulties through comedy is a pointedly sad, grippingly personal character study that refuses to take it easy on either its story’s characters or the audience witnessing them make one mistake after another. Will Arnett delivers the performance of a lifetime as the wannabe funnyman watching his life fall apart at the seams, while Laura Dern steals the picture out from everyone as his soon-to-be ex-wife who’s trying to maintain some semblance of boring normalcy for her struggling family.

– Portions of this feature reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle

[Page 1, 2, 4, 5, 6]