Over-the-Top, Stupid but Smart, Brutal, Ecstatic, and Strangely Beautiful: Best Movies of 2025

"Untitled (Buffalos)," David Wojnarowicz, 1989-90. 

EDDINGTON is the best movie of 2025 for me. I was a little afraid of seeing it just because of Ari Aster's last one. But from start to finish this is what movies should be, especially now: brutal, stylish, ecstatic, absurd, strangely beautiful, creepy, fast-paced, shocking but also comforting in the way it moves beyond partisanship and genre into its own trippy delirious territory. It's an existential BLAZING SADDLES, with a touch of HIGH NOON and BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. I truly loved ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, but EDDINGTON fiercely moves beyond this or that philosophical stance into a political terrain of "what in the hell?" It gorgeously manifests and defends the absurdity that is America without sacrosanctity or even irony. It just is what it is in all its horrible comedic melancholy glory. And Joachin Phoenix is a genius in it. He is an anti-hero without any vestige of heroism. And still your heart is open to him. Which in all the maelstrom and gunshots and nastiness suffusing EDDINGTON qualifies as high art. For real. (The picture above by David Wojnarowicz was used on the poster for EDDINGTON. David is one of my favorite artists. He died from AIDS in 1992, but for most of his young life he created amazing writing and art that really did for visual art and literature what EDDINGTON does for movies right now:  cutting to the chase while also paying homage to the absurd random unfairness of it all. Check out his work and life here.) 

The rest of the best are below (not necessarily in any order):

HAMNET wrecked me. Jesse Buckley's performance is so pure and feral and nuanced and full of love and joy and hurt you feel wrapped up in it like a bandage. She's so alive and real it gives the sorrow a jolt of life and life a jolt of sorrow. A movie you only need to experience once. I'll never be able to forget its elegant and brutal depiction of how love and death and art all intersect somewhere beyond us and yet also deep inside us too.

TRAIN DREAMS is such a pretty and terribly sad movie. The cinematography wipes your eyes away until you are in a nostalgic trance and every actor underplays to the point of actuality even inside that trance, that fever, that dream. It truly is an experience. I remember reading Denis Johnson's novella when it first came out and just sobbing my way through it. The words were so chosen and precise you almost didn't need them somehow. It was a triumph of delicacy and grandeur and memory and meaning. The movie follows suit. Both are for the ages.

Eva Victor's SORRY, BABY is truly a heartbreaker in the best sense. It narrates a "me-too" tale about a grad-student sexually assaulted by her advisor without dread or sententiousness. Just a soulful deadpan sense of trying to make it out of the whole thing alive and sane. Victor not only writes/directs but stars too, and every scene is refreshingly counterintuitive; the whole movie finds meaning and momentum in everyday decency, finds comedy and grace in the way people stumble into survival. The ending is both devastating and one of the sweetest soliloquies ever put on film.  

FRANKENSTEIN is so beautiful and sweet and furious and old-fashioned it gives off its own sad baroque glow. Guillermo del Toro's tribute to and deluxe rendition of Mary Shelley's novel delivers not just through costume and style and setting but really through a pulsating narrative that not only gives the monster his due but also finds a secondary delicacy in all the other relationships and circumstances. It's a long haul but you don't care. And Jacob Elordi's performance is kind of miraculous: specific but epic, completely in and out of control and by the end a symbol of both tenderness and rage, a makeshift cyclone of tossed-aside body parts and misery and dedication to finding a way out.

MARTY SUPREME is gorgeously overwhelming in the best way. Like a Wes Anderson movie on meth, but also somehow classical and classy and serious in its setup and delivery. As soon as we got home from seeing it, I turned on TCM and CITIZEN KANE was on, and I thought: MARTY SUPREME is the CITIZEN KANE of table-tennis movies. A joke but not. Kind of like the movie itself. Chalamet is the geeky charismatic energy engine for the whole thing, but Gwyneth Paltrow is the true hidden gem. She plays so many real emotions without playing them -- she just lives through the shenanigans and heartache and kind of effortlessly steals the show.

JAY KELLY is blissful and sorrowful and a lot of fun. George Clooney kind of plays himself but with a tragic spin. The tragedy, though, makes the movie vibrate beyond vanity. Adam Sandler kills me in it as Jay's world-weary manager. He is so genuine and vulnerable you feel like you've known him since high school. There's a glamor and speed to the whole affair. Noah Baumbach directs it with a sense of both whimsy and reserve. Nothing feels self-serving. Clooney is so shiny and exhausted and kind you want to protect him from his own good fortune by the end. The cinematography is a vacation, the whole atmosphere and vibe a memory channeled through a dream channeled through ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT.

Renate Reinsve is so lovely and angst-ridden and alive in SENTIMENTAL VALUE you can get lost just noticing her face, the way she moves. Joachim Trier, the filmmaker, really understands this so he builds this gorgeous fast-paced and kind of dour movie around her. Stellan Skarsgård plays her father, a stoic but sincere movie director who wants to reconcile through casting her in his next movie. All the movie-within-a-movie stuff is great, but what truly matters is the way each scene kind of trembles and aches under the surface. By the time you get to the end you can't really think of another movie that captures sadness and redemption so clearly.

BUGONIA is a beautiful meditative freakfest that pulls itself apart as you watch it. Jesse Plemmons is a human echo-chamber in it, a cast-aside nobody living in the fever-dreamscape manifested by his childhood and current economics and his own sad storybook paranoia. He kidnaps a lady exec expertly portrayed by Emma Stone thinking she is an outer-space-alien queen. And funky chaos ensues. But what happens in the movie is secondary to Jesse's total dedication to being this sad sweet messed-up guy. He owns the folk-horror atmosphere director Yorgos Lanthimos creates. This is a movie you dream with, not watch, and by the end when it doesn't quite reach its full terrible potential you are almost grateful.

Movies are a spiritual experience and ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece, is a stained-glass cathedral blowing up every 15 seconds or so. It is a gorgeous chase film, a thriller, a family-falling-apart dramedy, a violent satirical non-stop meditation on America right now and probably forever, and most importantly a strangely viscerally optimistic hymn to what's next. Leonardo is brilliant as a low-rent revolutionary and Sean Penn is exhilaratingly sad as a monster-militia-man and Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills just kills everything in her path when she's on-screen. But my fave performance, the reason for the season, is Chase Infiniti Payne as Willa, the daughter of all this revolution. Chase is so deft and real and beautiful she carries you out of the noise into a future we might be able to live with. PTA deserves all the Oscars or whatever but Chase lands the plane.

WEAPONS is epic in a really authentic crazy freakfest kind of way: funny but horrifying, soulful and meanspirited, dedicated to its own sense of menace and charisma. It floats from POV to POV, finds plot points in sad little crevices, but also goes ballistic at the end: full feverdream catharsis. Zach Cregger has a diabolical somehow delicate sensibility that reminds me of Jonanthan Demme's SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, that creepy glee found in the dank basement of everybody's mind. But also he pilfers high-style hijinks from David Fincher's GONE GIRL, transforming zeitgeist into outsider art. A story about missing kids and an old sick witch and an alcoholic school-teacher blooms into something mythic and miraculous. And throw in Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY too -- the precise locations, the secret crystal-clear irony in every scene. The acting follows suit. Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys is remarkable. She harnasses the whole movie's dread and absudity and trauma with one sad cruel sweetie-pie look. And Julia Garner as the teacher finds a way to be both beaten down and triumphant in every moment. It's been a while since a movie got me going like this one. One of the best movies I've seen in 2025.

SINNERS is a celebration and cross-pollination of Tarantino and Prince, a fusion of geeky astute cinema and pure devious delirious funk. The vampire metaphor crisps up into an allegory about creativity and ascendence, invitation and denial. Michael B. Jordan is the sexy fierce ringmaster onscreen, but it's Ryan Coogler's messed-up masterpiece. Streamlined and phosphorescent and completely sublimely focused on the meaning and menace of genius.

I had a sweet sort of amazing experience watching SUPERMAN. It's jampacked and overstuffed but somehow sleek and economical. And it has a big heart anyone can access. SUPERMAN offers an ethos more than a message it wants to impart. Just plain human kindness overarching and eventually enveloping a messed-up universe. David Corenswet is perfect, and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois has such easy real chemistry with him. In fact, everyone in it has that same breezy charm so that all the big-scale nonsensical goings-on become high-stake backdrops to emotion and vulnerability and decency. James Gunn is a genius at whittling down and building up and vice versa. The whole thing felt succinct but beautifully over-the-top. Stupid but smart. Perfect. And the dog. Holy crap. The dog alone is worth the price of admission.