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Wow, I hate to burst everyone’s bubble, but this wasn’t a great year for film. We got one destined-to-be-a-classic masterpiece, and then a whole bunch of very good 4/5-star movies. My biggest sadness this year came from not being able to see Sirāt, which, based on everything I’ve heard, might have bridged the gap between the masterpiece and the merely 4/5-star movies. Oh well. I guess Neon has too many films on their plate this Oscar season and is waiting until late February for a wide release.

Speaking of Neon, they basically produced every international, not-in-English film this year, four of which made my list. That’s right, 4 out of 10 movies on my list are not in English. Bad news to all you subtitle haters out there. My advice? Learn to divorce yourself from your phone for a 2–3 hour stretch and let an artist’s blood, sweat, and tears completely envelop you.

If you just had a baby, though, there’s nothing I can do for you. You’re not going to be able to watch a movie with subtitles for years. Beyond that, there are a lot of indies on my list, a few “comedies,” and lots and lots of horror films about grief and loss, mostly on my honorable mentions list.

So dive in and eat up!

10. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

written & directed by: Mary Bronstein / USA / 114 minutes

cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, A$AP Rocky, Christian Slater, Ivy Wolk, Danielle Macdonald

An A24 art house horror film that successfully mines buckets of gallows humor, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a deeply cringe but intensely engrossing story about a mother with next to no support, played brilliantly by Rose Byrne, struggling to care for her very sick young daughter who has a freakin’ tube coming out of her stomach.

In a smart creative choice, we never fully see the daughter. We only catch glimpses of legs, arms, or a hand. And we hear her whining voice. It is an effective strategy that forces the audience to place all of their emotional investment on Linda, rather than splitting attention between mother and child. It may sound cruel, but it works, peeling back the layers of what makes this thorny mama tick.

Enough cannot be said about Byrne’s performance. It’s incredible, painful, and always grounded no matter how insane things get.

Available for Digital Rental & Purchase

1 Oscar Nomination: Best Actress – Rose Byrne

9. Weapons

written & directed by: Zach Cregger / USA / 128 minutes

cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Amy Madigan

It has been called the Magnolia of horror films, and Weapons is easily the best and most inventive spook-fest of 2025. Structured like an A Song of Ice and Fire novel, it breaks its six main characters into their own consectuive POV chapters. The story centers on a third grade class that goes missing, except for one child. Ring camera footage captures several of them fleeing their houses like little airplanes at the exact same time, disappearing into the distance.

We then jump ahead a month, and all of the children are still missing. The town is spiraling into insanity, and many of the parents, led by the ALPHA asshole parent, played by Josh Brolin, are blaming the kids’ homeroom teacher, played by Julia Garner, who has a history of being “inappropriate” at her job. The paranoia is thick, the antics are ugly.

We also follow the school principal, played by Benedict Wong, a cop, played by Alden Ehrenreich, who happens to be the teacher’s ex, an unhoused meth addict, played by Austin Abrams, and the third grader who did not go missing, played by Christopher Cary. Amy Madigan is also in the movie, but her role is a giant spoiler.

From there, Weapons leads you through a riveting and deeply unpredictable mystery, handing out clues one by one, each more bizarre than the last. Some viewers were underwhelmed by the answer to the mystery, but I found it to be a smart creative choice, one that gives us the most iconic horror villain in years. Weapons is a genuinely unique horror film, and I suspect people will be talking about it for a long time.

Streaming on HBOMax

1 Oscar Nomination: Best Supporting Actress – Amy Madigan

8. The Naked Gun

directed by: Akiva Schaffer / written by: Dan Gregor, Doug Mand & Akiva Schaffer

USA / 85 minutes

cast: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Danny Huston, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand

The funniest film of the year by a mile and a half, this reboot of the beloved Leslie Nielsen series slaps from beginning to end. It fires off a joke per minute like some kind of slapstick comedy machine gun. There’s a story, but it’s not important. The movie exists purely to move you from one gag to the next.

After all the Epic Movies and Disaster Movies and Scary Movie 11, it felt like the spoof genre had been run completely into the ground. Thank heavens writer and director Akiva Schaffer, one of the Lonely Island guys, came along to nurse it back to health.

Stepping into the role of Nielsen’s son, Liam Neeson is delightfully deadpan as the goofus detective, delivering every line with the sincerity of a chamber drama. Pamela Anderson is also very funny, hot off the heels of her excellent performance in The Last Showgirl. The ultra-intense Danny Huston is marvelous as well, channeling a gloriously cheesy Bond villain.

This is not hyperbole, but by the time it was over my stomach was literally sore from laughing. Or it could have been that pizza.

Streaming on Amazon Prime and Paramount+

0 0scar Nominations

7. Marty Supreme

directed by: Josh Safdie / written by: Ronald Bronstein & Josh Sadie

cast: Timothée Chalamet, Odessa A’zion, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler Okonma, Kevin O’Leary, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrera, Luke Manley, Emory Cohen, Géza Röhrig, Penn Gillette, Sandra Bernhard, Fred Hechinger, David Mamet, Paul Grimstad, Koto Kawaguchi, Robert Pattinson

Pure explosive energy is the best way to describe Marty Supreme, because it is an experience more than anything else. I probably would have ranked this lower, but the more distance I get from it, the more it lingers. As the year goes on, I find myself appreciating its rougher edges and stranger choices more than some of the cleaner, more polite films.

Marty Supreme is not especially well structured. It is pretty fucking all over the place. Still, it never wanders into territory that is not either interesting or believable for the characters. Even at its most chaotic, the movie feels emotionally grounded, which is what keeps it from flying apart completely.

Timothée Chalamet delivers the best performance of his career here, a big, loud, showy Porterhouse steak of a turn that amplifies everything around him. The rest of the cast is rock solid as well. While I do not enjoy or admire this as much as Uncut Gems or Good Time, which is still the Safdies’ best film in my opinion, this is endlessly entertaining without ever feeling mainstream.

The best way to describe it is a go-for-broke Forrest Gump for perverts, where the main character is a total shit who leaves a wake of destruction behind him. It is as if someone spiked the American feel-good epic formula with bath salts.

In Theaters

9 Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor – Timothée Chalamet, Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design

6. Sentimental Value

directed by: Joachim Trier; written by: Eskil Vogt & Joachim Trier / Norway / 133 minutes

cast: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning, Anders Danielsen, Jesper Christensen, Lena Endre, Corey Michael Smith, Catherine Cohen

I love intimate, lived in family dramas. In the Bedroom, The Son’s Room, The Celebration. And now Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier adds Sentimental Value to the mix, a film about an aging filmmaker, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), trying to apologize for being an absentee father to his eldest daughter, Nora (Renate Reinsve), by casting her as the lead in his new movie, a supposed masterpiece in his own mind. When she promptly tells him to go fuck himself, Gustav turns his attention to an up and coming American actress (Elle Fanning) to take the role instead.

This decision dredges up a lot of old shit between Nora, Gustav, and Agnes (the sensational Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), the youngest daughter and the most stable member of the family, all of whom have their own unique and often delusional ways of coping. Gustav also plans to shoot the film in the ancestral family home, where Nora and Agnes’ birth mother has just died and where Gustav’s own mother famously hung herself.

If this sounds like pure doom and gloom, it is far more interesting than depressing, and it even delivers two genuine laugh out loud moments. There are no big Oscar bait blowups here, no easy explanations or tidy answers. Just richly written, deeply developed characters doing their best to stay happy or remain relevant, and often failing spectacularly.

In Theaters & Available for Digital Rental & Purchase

9 Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress – Renate Reinsve, Best Supporting Actor – Stellan Skarsgård, Best Supporting Actress – Elle Fanning, Best Supporting Actress – Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing

5. No Other Choice

directed by: Park Chan-wook / written by: Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar & Lee Ja-hye

South Korea / 139 minutes

cast: Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min, Yeom Hye-ran, Cha Seung-won, Yoo Yeon-sook

Getting laid off is some really serious shit, especially in South Korea. Last year I got laid off myself, and beyond the financial panic and the crushing sense of rejection, I found my mental health quietly unraveling. A deep feeling of uselessness sets in as the weeks turn into months. With no real reason to get out of bed and no routine to anchor the days, I started to spiral, to the point where afternoon cries became a regular item on my schedule.

Enough about me. I loved No Other Choice not just because it is an incredibly solid piece of filmmaking, technically assured, funny, sad, and genuinely poignant, but because it understands every fucking nuance of being laid off. Not just what it does to you, but how it radiates outward and reshapes the lives of the people who love you. Lee Byung-hun plays Man-soo, a former paper company manager fired by some visiting American prick at his factory.

From there, his comfortable middle class life collapses piece by piece. The family gives up their dogs, then the car, then the streaming subscriptions, heard that, and eventually even the house. Unable to find new work, Man-soo comes up with a simple, brutal solution. He researches who else is applying for paper company manager jobs and murders the three applicants more qualified than him. In his mind, he has no other choice. In this economy, who can blame him?

In Theaters

0 Oscar Nominations

4. It Was Just An Accident

written & directed by: Jafar Panahi / Iran / 104 minutes

cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbetan, Majid Panahi

I didn’t flat-out love this the first time I saw it, but months of letting it marinate in my swampy subconscious have made me really appreciate what a psychologically taut—and ultimately ingenious—little thriller it is.

It’s basically about a guy, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who, through a chance encounter (the titular “accident”) bumps into a man whose voice he recognizes as his torturer. He ends up incapacitating the guy, kidnapping him, and driving him around to people he knows who were also tortured by him, trying to verify whether it’s actually the same person.

Everyone thinks it might be, but nobody is 100% sure, and that seed of doubt—combined with the way dragging this guy around forces everyone to relive their own trauma—is what fuels It Was Just an Accident’s intensity.

Adding to this, the movie was filmed in secret by Jafar Panahi, and you can tell from the framing of the shots. There’s also a hilarious recurring gag where corrupt cops keep making characters pay them off using tap-to-pay.

And the last two scenes of It Was Just an Accident are among the best stretches of film I’ve seen in the past decade.

Available for Digital Rental & Purchase

2 OSCAR NOMINATIONS: Best International Feature, Best Original Screenplay

3. Sorry Baby

written & directed: Eva Victor / USA / 104 minutes

cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ace, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch

The best indie of the year. The best film debut of the year. The best screenplay of the year.

Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is a comedy-drama absolutely brimming with personality and life. Victor stars as Agnes, a literature professor at a small liberal arts college in New England. After she experiences an extremely traumatic event at the hands of a mentor, one she’s unable to receive justice for, Agnes does her best to move forward with her life.

A lesser film would make that “traumatic event” its sole focus, but Victor understands that people are multi-faceted and that trauma, while shaping, does not wholly define a person. There isn’t much in the way of traditional plot here; this is pure slice-of-life cinema, built around a deeply compelling character. Miraculously, it avoids nearly every cliché and trope of the typical Sundance indie.

Sorry, Baby is devastatingly funny at times and simply devastating at others. You grow to genuinely love Agnes, as well as her grad school friends, and the film earns that affection honestly. There’s also a terrific recurring gag involving a rival grad student, jealous of Agnes’s talent, who pops into scenes like a live-action cartoon.

Brilliant.

Streaming on HBOMax

0 OSCAR NOMINATIONS

2. The Secret Agent

written & directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho / Brazil / 158 minutes

cast: Wagner Moura, Maria Fernanda Cândido, Udo Kier, Fernando Solimões, Carlos Fransisco, Tânia Maria, Robério Diógenes, Gabriel Leone

Few films are able to so seamlessly transport you to another place and time as Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. The place is Brazil. The year is 1977, described early on as a time of great mischief. A shitty fascist government is stomping on the little people, and our hero Armando, played by the incredible Wagner Moura, is caught directly in its gears.

Armando is a former university professor on the run from a crazed conservative businessman who wants him executed for mouthing off during a meeting. Forced underground, Armando falls in with an affable tribe of revolutionaries and political dissidents, all while attempting to reconnect with his young son. He may not be a secret agent, but once his cover is blown, his life begins to resemble a high-octane spy novel, complete with assassins lurking around every corner.

The Secret Agent is immaculately crafted and perfectly cast. It should win the Casting Oscar because no one feels like an actor. The film’s plot is so dense and intricately constructed that it demands your full attention. This is not a movie to half-watch while scrolling on your phone. There are so many subplots flying around that it is easy to get lost if you are not completely locked in.

One subplot involves a gang of idiot cops investigating a mystery centered on a severed leg. Another concerns a comic strip published in the local paper about that same severed leg hopping around Brazil and violently attacking gay cruisers in public parks. Yes, really. The result is a bizarre, wholly original, and ultimately compelling meditation on how fascism, particularly the dismantling of social programs, impacts the lives of decent people just trying to get by. It is also a film about generational trauma.

The Secret Agent is a lot, but when you finally sit down and surrender to it, everything feels strangely harmonious. I’m officially rooting for Wagner Moura to win Best Actor at the Oscars. It is easily the best performance in the category.

In Theaters

4 Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor – Wagner Moura, Best Casting, Best International Feature

1. One Battle After Another

written & directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson / USA / 162 minutes

cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Chase Infiniti, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Brooklyn Demme, Paul Grimstad, Shayna McHale, Jim Ratterman, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey, John Hoogenakker, Starletta DuPois, Eric Schweig, D.W. Moffett, Kevin Tighe, Dijon

The best film of the year by leaps and bounds. There is a genuinely wide margin of quality between this and The Secret Agent for me, even though I love The Secret Agent quite a bit.

One Battle After Another is a bona fide masterpiece of tone, story, character, and societal relevance. At its most basic level, it is an action thriller. It is also an absurdist comedy, a father-daughter drama, and a horror movie about the simple terror of not being able to charge your phone. These genres should not coexist this cleanly, yet somehow they do.

The cast is utterly flawless. The film features one of the best car chases I have ever seen, accomplished without a single car changing lanes. It never drags for even a second. At two hours and forty minutes, it is pure, relentless entertainment from start to finish.

What truly sets the film apart is how smart and strange it is, in ways Hollywood epics almost never allow themselves to be. Stop reading and go watch it. This is the best film of the past five years.

In Theaters and Streaming on HBOMax

13 Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor – Leonardo DiCaprio, Best Supporting Actor – Benicio Del Toro, Best Supporting Actor – Sean Penn, Best Supporting Actress – Teyana Taylor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound

HONORABLE MENTIONS

in order of goodness

BUGONIA by Yorgos Lathinmos

A bonkers dark comedy about conspiracy theories and kidnappings. The third most political narrative feature I saw this year.

CLOUD by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

An action movie from Japanese slow burn horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse). Thrilling and inventive, imagine an action movie where the camera barely moves.

THE PLAGUE by Charlie Polinger

A riveting and painful drama about bullying masquerading as a body horror movie about bullying. Some of the best child acting of the year.

BLACK BAG by Steven Sodebergh

A dramedy about relationships masquerading as a spy movie. Sodebergh’s best effort in years and some wonderfully clever dialogue by David Koepp.

SPLITSVILLE by Michael Angelo Covino

Speaking of relationships, one of the funniest movies in recent memory about marriage and polyamory. Contains the best fight sequence of the year.

BRING HER BACK by Danny & Michael Philippou

The most hardcore horror movie of the year that’s also a great exploration of loss and grief and child mutilation. Seriously not for everyone but Academy Award Nominee Sally Hawkins classes up the picture.

28 YEARS LATER by Danny Boyle

Arguably the best film in the series, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s (writer) decades later sequel is a surprisingly poignant exploration of….grief and loss.

THE SHROUDS by David Cronenberg

Another exploration of loss and grief, this time way more cerebral but not as entertaining. This is Cronenberg’s smartest and most coherent movie in years.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS by Sean Byrne

A fun, balls-to-the-walls Australian horror movie that isn’t a metaphor for anything. It’s about a deranged serial killer who feeds tourists to sharks. It’s all going swimmingly until he abducts the wrong woman who gives him the fight of his life.

THE LONG WALK by Francis Lawrence

Far better King adaptation than The Running Man because while both have very similar plots, this chose to focus on the relationships between the characters essentially sentenced to die. I really cared about these kids. Great ensemble, was snubbed for a Best Casting Oscar nomination.