Up until a couple of months ago, I wasn’t 100% certain that I was going to complete a full post like this, as my willingness and capacity to do so has traditionally been commensurate not JUST with how much time I have available during the last week of the year (though that is always a factor) but also with my passion for the year’s films. After all, the top film on this list has occupied that spot and hasn’t budged since I first saw it in April. That being said, the Quicktime catch ups and late inning screenings that I have been occupying myself with since October (number two on this list moved up a spot after each of my three screenings of it in the last week!) necessitated that I commit to making a proper list, as 2025 turned out to be (sneakily?) kind of a banner year. The 25th year of the 21st Century started with Hollywood literally burning and ended with it figuratively burning. But I guess that makes Ryan Coogler, James Cameron, Jafar Panahi, Chloe Zhao, and Josh Safdie the unelected Neros that we need right now. They’re not going down without a fiddle.

10. Orwell: 2+2=5

In a sea of unqualified and undistinguished editorial exercises within the documentary realm (from both sides of the political aisle), films with anything resembling a political agenda can go from information dissemination to counterproductive “Chicken Littling” before a thesis statement has even been delivered. In other words, it is getting harder and harder to divine an opinion out of the noise. Enter the great Raoul Peck (he of the Oscar-nominated adaptation of James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, I Am Not Your Negro), and his formally ambitious biographical essay cum cautionary polemic, Orwell: 2+2=5. Working in true video essay hybrid form, Peck examines the final years of George Orwell’s life (particularly his time spent drafting 1984), drawing from his journal entries and letters to friends and colleagues, while juxtaposing the social satirist’s prescient speculation with 21st Century examples of many of his darkest predictions. Peck’s most effective structural tool is his invocation of the myriad adaptations of both 1984 and Animal Farm throughout the 20th Century, reinforcing not just how relevant Orwell’s work continued to be, long after his death, but how effectively it lent itself to reinterpretation across format, medium, and context.

9. Sirāt

You could do a lot worse than taking a chance on a tagline such as: “a desperate father trying to find his missing daughter gets drawn into an itinerant rave subculture as his search takes him across the North African desert.” Pretty solid as a hook. But Sirāt (an Islamic term referring to the narrow bridge over Hell that souls cross to reach Paradise) has much more on its mind than simply being a trippy Hardcore for the BPM set (though it’s absolutely that too!). With elements of Sorcerer, The Road Warrior, and Apocalypse Now sampled liberally throughout, director Óliver Laxe’s journey into the Moroccan heart of darkness is deeply disturbing, thrillingly original, and exceptionally disinclined toward explanation or satisfying analysis. Like any good rave, it kind of just needs to be experienced to be truly understood.

8. It Was Just An Accident

In a year in which comic absurdity masking dark, disturbing thematic agendas seemed to be the coin of the realm (see: No Other Choice, The Secret Agent), Jafar Panahi’s eleventh feature film, It Was Just An Accident, achieves staggering margins between comedy and tragedy, successfully coexisting in both worlds. Try this on for the setup to a joke: A conflicted auto mechanic, a bride and groom (made up in full gown and tux), their wedding photographer, and her ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend are riding around Tehran in a minivan, trying to figure out what to do with the guy who is bound and gagged in their trunk. The film goes through the motions of a farce, hitting all of the comic beats and endearing us to its motley crew of kidnappers. But the identity of the hostage belies a darker truth, and the reason for the kidnapping is as serious as can be found in the most tragic corners of melodrama. It’s unlike any film I’ve ever seen before and it’s unquestionably going to stay with me for a very long time.

7. Black Bag

Director Steven Soderbergh and writer David Koepp have been working within the espionage environs so frequently and effectively over the last thirty years (both separately and, increasingly, together) that it would be easy to write off a film like Black Bag as a disposable trifle, based on its modest scope and 90-minute run time. That would be a mistake. What they’ve accomplished here is incredibly sophisticated and deceptively complex. These two filmmakers just have a knack for making it all look easy. Like a dinner party in which the menu was curated by Agatha Christie and John le Carré, Black Bag is a spy vs spy thriller whose secret weapon is its crackerjack cast and its easy facility with sex appeal (facilitated by said crackerjack, sexy cast). They even manage to find a way to get a former James Bond in on the fun, lest anyone be confused about what we’re ultimately up to here as both genre exercise and 1960s throwback.

6. Sentimental Value

Like Noah Baumbach’s flawed but fascinating (and ultimately even quite moving) Jay Kelly, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value also centers on a man coming to the end of his career in the entertainment industry, taking stock of his artistic legacy, and reckoning with the cost of his estrangement from his two actress daughters. But, to the extent that Sentimental Value is ultimately more successful that Jay Kelly, it’s largely due to the way that it decenters the father character, and focuses on the triangulation between he and his daughters. A never-better Stellan Skarsgård (somehow legitimizing the “role he was born to play” cliché) is the tragic patriarch at the center of this domestic melodrama. But he ultimately cedes the film to Renate Reinsve (as a “working” actress who can’t get out of her own way) and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (a a former child prodigy actress), as the sisters whose fraught historical dynamic emerges as the film’s beating heart.

5. No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook possesses the dark wit of the Coen Brothers, the geometric precision of Stanley Kubrick, and the screw-turning, thriller instinct of Alfred Hitchcock. Yet even as his influences and comps are always clear, he’s also somehow completely peerless–a true one-of-one filmmaker. Park Chan-wook films could ONLY be made by Park Chan-wook and No Other Choice is no other exception. If his sexy and sublime Decision to Leave (#5 on my 2022 top ten list) was his noir riff on Vertigo or Basic Instinct, No Other Choice feels like an attempt to channel the same stylistic sensibilities into a more socioeconomic milieu, examining just how far the indignity of unemployment and the posionous spectre of late stage capitalism may compel a desperate man to go. Like The Secret Agent, the film’s secret weapon is its comic absurdity, which masks a dark, resonant, deeply topical undercurrent, waiting to be unearthed.

4. The Secret Agent

To try to describe or even comment on a film like The Secret Agent within the modest confines I impose upon myself in these blurbs would be an exercise in futility as well as a critical disservice to a film replete with so many confectionery pleasures and incorrigible contradictions. But, suffice to say that the film is equal parts deathly-seriously historical document about living under a military dictatorship in late 1970s Brazil, as well as giddily-winking paen to writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s relationship to all of the cinematic genre exercises and movie palaces that shaped his tastes and interests. The film is a staggering exercise in deconstruction, from its loaded ruse of a title, all the way to its heartbreaking, recontextualizing epilogue. It’s a movie about movies… or is it?

3. Nouvelle Vague

“A film about the French New Wave and the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, presented in the style and personality of that seminal, cinematic game-changer.” A tagline like that would suggest a self-satisfied, navel-gazing slog as a legion of annoyed women roll their eyes in unison as their cinephile Hinge dates mansplains the historical “importance” of Breathless. But leave it to the patron saint of “hangout movies”–the great Richard Linklater (he of the utter lack of pretention or vaingloriousness)–to design the cinematic equivalent of a cocktail party, which just so happens to take place in the ideal artistic epoch worth hanging out in; namely, the Left Bank of Paris, circa 1959. Always hilarious, never didactic, always charming, never cloying, Nouvelle Vague is “European film history as amuse-bouche.” Vive les vagues, nouvelles et vieux!”

2. Marty Supreme

Not for nothing that director Josh Safdie’s recurrent buzzword during the publicity blitz accompanying his new film’s release has been “postmodern.” His period sports epic, Marty Supreme, takes place in the early 1950s, is filtered through the sonic jukebox and stylistic sensibility of the mid-1980s, and concerns a central character defined by an insatiable, stubborn, destructive ambition, unmistakable as a commentary on a certain brand of millennial toxicity. The latter point is underscored by the fact that the character is played by an actor known for his professional ambition as well as his position as a late millennial icon. A 1950s table tennis thriller, scored to 1980s New Wave synth pop, which speaks to the millennial male milieu… If that’s not postmodernism, I don’t know what is. It’s an ambitious gambit. It’s a wild conceit. It’s an unqualified success. Advantage: Safdie.

1. Sinners

If genre exercises provide the artistic inside track for filmmakers who want to smuggle ambitious philosophical interrogatives and sprawling allegorical ideas into big tent entertainment, then there may be no more successful purveyor of both genre and spectacle to come along in the last decade than one, Ryan Coogler. His decision to frame his treatise on the history of blues music and institutional apartheid within a generational vampire flick goes from savvy to inspired over the course of his sprawling, sexy, style-defining barn burner. Five films into a feature filmography (which already includes billion-dollar grossers and Best Picture nominees) and still south of his fortieth birthday, Coogler may have just made his first true, personal, original, instant-classic masterpiece. And he’s just getting started.

Honorable mentions:

- After the Hunt
- Avatar: Fire and Ash
- Eddington
- Hamnet
- Jay Kelly
- K Pop Demon Hunters
- Megadoc
- One Battle After Another
- The Phoenician Scheme
- Weapons