It’s been a year, dear readers.
The less said about whether or not that’s a good thing the better, but at least we had flickering lights in dark rooms to distract us from, well, just about everything in the outside world. Hopefully that’s as true in 2026 and beyond as it was in 2025 (though a certain acquisition could further imperil the theatrical experience). Before we mourn the future, though, let’s toast the year that was with the best movies of 2025.
2025 was very much the year of Josh O’Connor, whose breakthrough in last year’s Challengers led to leading roles in The History of Sound, The Mastermind, Wake Up Dead Man, and Rebuilding. The last of these was the quietest addition to his filmography this year, but it also squeaked past The Mastermind as the best. A Love Song director Max Walker-Silverman returns with another low-key drama set in rural Colorado, this one following a cowboy recovering from the wildfire that destroyed his ranch — and, with it, his sense of self. That isn’t any easier to regain than your livelihood, but Walker-Silverman and O’Connor find enough hope in the small moments for us to find some too.
With its lyrical narration and painterly cinematography, Train Dreams is reminiscent of nothing so much as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — a comparison many movies have aspired to but few have earned. Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s elegiac novella does that and more in telling the story of a logger who spends most of his long life in the Pacific Northwest in general and Idaho in particular, using his story as a metaphor for the story of America as it pushed into the 20th century and beyond. Joel Edgerton’s career-best performance is one of many reasons to seek out this Netflix offering, but it’s far from the only one.
For her fourth feature, Lucile Hadžihalilović reunited with the star of her first: Marion Cotillard, who played the lead in 2004’s Innocence. A surreal mood piece in which the Oscar winner plays an actress starring in a new film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, The Ice Tower features several layers of artifice — including, most notably, a film within a film — that give the entire production an air of unreality. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, that might prove frustrating; in Hadžihalilović’s, it’s as compelling as a dream that refuses to end.
Though it would take you nearly as long to watch some of Lav Diaz’s movies as it would to circumnavigate the globe — 2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family is 10 hours and 24 minutes — his latest is practically huggable at a mere 160 minutes. It also stars Gael García Bernal as one of history’s most famous explorers, but a conventional biopic this is not. Diaz’s slow-cinema ethos is on proud display throughout, allowing the granular details most filmmakers gloss over to come to the fore even as Magellan is charting a path through history that can only end one way.
As desperate as Hollywood is for movies like Sinners, it certainly seems reluctant to actually make them. Not a lot of movies carrying $100 million price tags also carry this much ambition, as the Fruitvale Station, Creed, and Black Panther director’s latest is both a big-tent horror movie with widespread appeal and an auteur-driven statement of purpose that, unlike most big-budget studio productions of late, was based on an original story. Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s go-to leading man, is at the top of his game as twin brothers who survived World War I and gangland Chicago but may not survive what awaits them back home in the Mississippi Delta: the most frightening vampires we’ve seen onscreen in decades.
Do aliens walk among us in the guise of pharmaceutical CEOs? That’s the question raised by the ever-outré Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, but it isn’t really the point. Emma Stone stars as the executive in question, who’s kidnapped by a delusional conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons) who intends to make her pay for her supposed crimes. What follows is every bit as absurd as you’d expect from the director of Dogtooth, The Lobster, and Poor Things, but it’s also a uniquely effective blend of the sad and the scary. Lanthimos takes us down a rabbit hole that, though extreme, isn’t any more far-fetched than the ones countless terminally online young men are exploring at this very moment.
One of the year’s biggest performances came from one of the smallest actors. Nine-year-old Nina Ye is superlative in the title role of Shih-Ching Tsou’s warmhearted coming-of-age story, the particulars of which are unique to its Taipei setting but the heart of which is universal. Sad, sweet, and vibrant, Left-Handed Girl suggests great things to come from both its director and cast, including Janel Tsai and Ma Shih-yuan.
The Iranian government will never stop Jafar Panahi from making movies, not that it hasn’t tried. Arrested, imprisoned, and otherwise persecuted throughout his career, Panahi has persisted through it all — including a ban on filmmaking that he obviously didn’t abide by. It Was Just an Accident ranks among his best, perhaps because he knows the subject unfortunately well: an authoritarian regime intent on stamping out dissent and the survivors of political violence deciding whether to move on with grace or vengeance. There are no easy answers in Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, just a growing sense that some forms of captivity never truly end.
Calling a movie important isn’t always a compliment, as too many films about hot-button issues privilege messaging over storytelling. Not so April, Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili’s unnerving follow-up to 2020’s Beginning, which follows a doctor who not-so-secretly moonlights as an abortion provider in a country where the procedure is all but illegal. No one wants to do this work, she explains in a crucial scene, but someone has to do it — a defense of her dangerous vocation that’s all but impossible to argue with by the time the credits roll.
Though I’m inclined to believe that every movie should be like Sound of Falling, the fact that so few are is part of what made Mascha Schilinski’s out-of-nowhere masterpiece so special. Masterful in its craftsmanship and devastating in its time-traversing narrative, the film is an awe to behold from beginning to end even as its ghost-story trappings question the very notion of traditional beginnings and endings.
