Top 10 Films of 2025
10. 28 Years Later (Dir: Danny Boyle)
Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland return to the apocalyptic wasteland they created in 2002 with 28 Days Later, unveiling an evocative coming-of-age masterwork that left me shellshocked. It’s about new life in a dying world, with youngster Alfie Williams delivering a stratospheric performance of resilience, determination, heartbreak, and restraint that delicately refines itself as his character’s understanding of life’s tumultuous highs and lows expands. It’s as if Boyle and Garland are channeling the working-class British grit of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, only adding a dash of George A. Romero for good measure. Unforgettable.
9. No Other Choice (Dir: Park Chan-wook)
South Korean dynamo Park Chan-wook returns with another unhinged slice of pointed social commentary with this insidiously hilarious and uncomfortably delightful death trap of familial happiness and workplace harmony that’s as purposefully unsubtle as it is intelligently insightful. Lee Byung-hun is fantastic as a recently unemployed family man who will do anything — including homicide — to ensure he gets a new job. This takedown of capitalistic excess and corporate largess is a bonkers delight, as Chan-wook slyly builds his latest to a conclusion that left me happily speechless.
8. Black Bag (Dir: Steven Soderbergh)
This is one of two terrific crowd-pleasers from director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp (the other being the spookily refined creepshow Presence) that, for whatever reason, were box office disappointments and didn’t fully connect with audiences until they were available to watch at home. Be that as it may, Black Bag remains a spy-vs.-spy corker, with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a pair of married British secret agents who are placed at odds when it becomes clear there is a mole buried within their department at MI6. This is a cagey, well-plotted case of international espionage and marital devotion that delivers the explosive goods. All of them. One shot at a time. Bravo.
7. Sentimental Value (Dir: Joachim Trier)
Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World, Thelma) comes calling with his best film yet, a first-rate kitchen-sink melodrama of family angst, sisterhood, and forgiveness. This is the story of two sisters, their estranged filmmaker father, and the Hollywood superstar (Elle Fanning) who’s been cast to portray a character unambiguously inspired by the memory of a woman who met with heartbreaking tragedy. Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas are extraordinary as the siblings, while Stellan Skarsgård has never been better as a man desperately hoping to make amends with his children, believing his new feature is the perfect way to do it. Trier doesn’t skimp on the emotion or the insight, sending things out on a titanically personal climax of introspective rumination that hits like an emotional sledgehammer yet also warmly embraces like a soothing hug.
6. The Long Walk (Dir: Francis Lawrence)
In the year’s best Stephen King adaptation (the others being the gorily loopy The Monkey and the disappointingly ham-fisted The Running Man), director Francis Lawrence and screenwriter JT Mollner take the author’s dystopian morality play and transform it into something distinctly personal. Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Mark Hamill are the familiar names, but the entire roster of up-and-coming young talents making up the “contestants” chosen to participate in a never-ending death march are all outstanding. As for the film, this perceptive nightmare looks poverty, community, capitalism, and fascism square in the eye and refuses to blink. Decidedly not for the faint of heart, but perceptively unforgettable all the same.
5. Train Dreams (Dir: Clint Bentley)
Life. Death. Longing. Love. Regret. Devastation. Rebirth. Based on the exquisitely austere novella by Denis Johnson, director Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a transformational stunner of a rapidly changing Pacific Northwest of the early 20th century. This picturesque saga of a man who literally lays the tracks for an ever-changing world he’ll barely see is a haunting spectacle that cuts deep and leaves lasting scars. But thanks to Joel Edgerton’s toweringly meditative performance, Adolpho Veloso’s magically lush cinematography, and Bentley’s astute direction, tragedy and triumph walk hand-in-hand. An absolute marvel.
4. Peter Hujar’s Day (Dir: Ira Sachs)
Two friends have a conversation in a New York apartment. One is a noteworthy photographer. The other is a journalist researching a new book. All the latter wants from the former is a detailed recollection of what he did over the course of a single day. That’s it. But what director Ira Sachs uncovers, with the aid of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1974 transcripts of her conversation with photographer Peter Hujar, is monumentally insightful. Art, gender, sexuality, love, longing, creation, and self-examination all coalesce with verbally creative explosiveness into something deeply personal and eloquently universal. Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall have rarely been better, while director of photography Alex Ashe’s camera achieves a level of earthshattering familiarity that allows this grainy snapshot of the past to feel as modern as today’s most viral 1080p spectacle. [Interview with Ira Sachs]
3. One Battle After Another (Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson)
Returning to the world of Thomas Pynchon for the first time since 2014’s Inherent Vice, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson takes the author’s novel Vineland and makes something explosively outrageous out of it. His film strips America and its supposed ideals naked, showcasing a land of constant upheaval, political malfeasance, irredeemable propagandistic programming, and militaristic excess that would be hysterical if it weren’t so shockingly spot-on. But Anderson also finds hope in resistance, humanity in community, and salvation in new generations eager to make a difference. At the center of it all is a mumbling, bumbling everyman who hasn’t made the best choices in life but whose love for his only child is so selfless and sincere that he’ll crack the world like an egg to see her protected — even if she proves to be particularly good at protecting herself. The all-star ensemble led by Leonardo DiCaprio is aces, but it is newcomer Chase Infiniti who steals the show.
2. Sorry, Baby (Dir: Eva Victor)
Sometimes a sandwich can save a life. At least, that’s how it seems in writer-director-star Eva Victor’s masterful Sorry, Baby, a film so confidently made, it’s difficult to believe this is the talented filmmaker’s feature-length debut. A semi-nonlinear chronicle of a young woman attempting to rebuild her life after a horrific assault at the hands of her thesis advisor, the film is a poignantly beguiling wonder that resolutely avoids taking the easy way out and never stoops to sensationalism or melodramatic excess to make its observations. Victor finds comedy where it is least expected, kindles tears in the most mundane of everyday occurrences, and evokes hope by looking into the eyes of a baby reaching out its tiny hand to latch on to a wary finger. This movie broke me. That’s a compliment. Now, how about that sandwich? [Interview with Eva Victor]
1. Sinners (Dir: Ryan Coogler)
No singular moment in all of 2025 knocked my socks off quite like when Ryan Coogler unleashed a mid-movie aria of musical brilliance in his epic Prohibition-era, Mississippi-set triumph, Sinners. Past, present, and future all meld seamlessly into one, and those dancing the night away inside the juke joint newly opened by twin brothers Smoke and Stack (a never-better Michael B. Jordan) go on a sweaty journey of melodic euphoria that leaves them breathless. Coogler tackles issues relating to race, gender, cultural assimilation, white supremacy, economic disparity, and familial pain with razor-sharp precision, and a healthy dollop of vampiric terror for good measure. Social commentary masking as crowd-pleasing pop entertainment has rarely been this bloody (figuratively and literally) entertaining. A masterpiece.
Six Favorite Documentaries (in alphabetic order)
The Alabama Solution (Dir: Andrew Jarecki, Charlotte Kaufman)
Nasty stuff, and certainly not for the faint of heart, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s hard-hitting documentary shines a light into the prison industrial complex in Alabama. This one hurts, and that’s exactly as it should be.
Come See Me in the Good Light (Dir: Ryan White)
As beautiful a tale of life, love, mortality, and found family as anything I’ve seen in ages. Stunning.
Heightened Scrutiny (Dir: Sam Feder)
Important and essential, but also deeply upsetting as all of this passion, intelligence, and is up against a politically compromised Supreme Court that treats the rule of law as something that can be bent to extreme conservative whims. Powerful, but also made me beyond angry.
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music (Dir: Questlove, Oz Rodríguez)
Rousing, joyous, and surprisingly informative, this celebration of 50 years of musical guests taking the Saturday Night Live stage is a rambunctiously exuberant event a half century in the making. Delightful.
The Perfect Neighbor (Dir: Geeta Gandbhir)
Speechless. That’s how The Perfect Neighbor left me. Mouth agape, shocked and stunned over what I just watched, this true crime case of Florida being Florida is a baffling examination of the human condition that’s as unique — and as uniquely peculiar — as they come.
WTO/99 (Dir: Ian Bell)
I lived through the May, 1999 events depicted in this documentary, and I still couldn’t take me eyes off of the screen for a single second of Ian Bell’s mesmerizing tour de force of journalistic excellence. As much a commentary on today’s current social political climate as it is a reminder of what transpired on the streets of downtown Seattle a little over a quarter century ago.
– Portions of this feature reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
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