Top 15 Movies of 2025: Honorable Mentions, Dishonorable Mentions, Other Stuff

Every year way too many truly great movies come out to ever talk about in a Top 15 List, so here's a lot of other movies I have something to say about. 

Plus all the other stuff, then 2025 is finally over:

Honorable Mentions:

Kohuko, dir. Lee Sang-il

Fun fact: this is the most successful live action Japanese film of all time. It only released for a brief window in the US, I made a point to see it at the Angelika ASAP when it came out. The plot involves two boys who are raised into a storied kabuki actor family, one of the noble bloodline, the other an adoptee. The conflict arises when the newcomer, Kikuo (Sōya Kurokawa as a child, Ryo Yoshizawa as an adult) proves to be much more talented than his brother, Ryusei (Keitatsu Koshiyama as a child, Ryusei Yokohama as an adult). In this art form, you are not just a son, you actually inherit a mighty name, and these two fight like Biblical brothers for their father's blessing. 

Then there is the gender complication. Kabuki theater still does not allow female actors. Female parts are played by men. Kikuo and Ryusei are both masters of the feminine side of the production, finding themselves as brothers, rivals, and even tragic lovers on stage. I'm reminded a lot of the novel and film, Farewell My Concubine, set in the similarly mono-gendered Peking Opera. Kohuko is a very pretty movie, a great big family epic of people chasing the mastery of art at the expense of all else.

I'm going to shoot out a stray bullet for a movie I disliked to catch: Kohuko is a better movie about the loneliness of the superstar than Jay Kelly.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 1 - Sinners

1. Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler

I saw Sinners three times in 2025. That does not happen for me. Usually I see these movies once, if they're lucky twice, and there's a good chance I never watch them again regardless of my opinion. At the time of writing, I want to go home and watch Sinners for a fourth time. Now, I don't really put much stock into how often you can watch a movie for rankings. Personally, I don't want to watch the same movies over and over, I want to see new things and new great things, or old great things that I haven't seen. If rewatchability were all that mattered, I would just make Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight the best movie of every year, because Demon Knight is near-perfect and extremely watchable. Looking back to my Best of 2025 List,  I haven't thought at any point, "yeah, I gotta watch I Saw the TV Glow right now". It is something of a heavy meal. 

With Sinners though, I need to rewatch this... right now.

Remember when Ryan Coogler's last movie was Black Panther 2 and it was terrible? And it looked terrible and muddy? In retrospect, that issue seems to be on Disney, not Coogler, not on his DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Sinners looks incredible. If you had the privilege to see it in IMAX, it was the most gorgeously-shot movie of the entire year. Day scenes are huge and sweeping like the rural Mississippi Delta of the 1930s was infinitely huge, the sky never-ending. At night Sinners is warm and sensual and also full of deep black depths from all corners of the Juke Joint. It is a night where anything is possible, for good and bad. Come back of the year, clearly.

Okay, so what if you took From Dusk Till Dawn and turned it into a period-piece blues musical? You had me at the Blues, you didn't even need to add vampires that sing Celtic folk music. Sinners is already a masterpiece by the conclusion of the first act when we have a full IMAX montage of all our heroes preparing for the opening of the Juke Joint, and then a Satanic figure literally crashes in the movie. Note he crashes from above, not below, we'll get back to that. 

The great heroes of this movie are two brothers, Smoke (Michael B. Jordan wearing blue) and Stack (Michael B. Jordan wearing red) coming back to their home town after adventures in war and gangland crime, ready to live their dream of opening the ultimate night club for the sharecroppers. They're living on borrowed time already, having ripped off Chicago, buying their land from a racist good ol' boy, and having based on a business model on making a profit from the poorest of the poor in the United States. They have to know this is a good time, not a long time.

Just they could not imagine how good of a time it would be. Or how short.

Ryan Coogler's previous smash hit was Black Panther, one of the greatest Marvel movies thanks to consciously being a work of mythmaking. Superheroes are often about nothing but punching. Or they could be symbols where ones are desperately. There was no Wakanda, there was no magical space in the heart of Africa where native culture held out against colonization and could be a beacon for repression everywhere. (And the near-Wakandas that people have relied behind, Dahomey or Ethiopia were all deeply flawed places with uncomfortable histories of slavery themselves.) Smoke and Stack are not real, there was no twin pair of broad-shouldered cool guy action heroes who could march into town and scare the Klan during the height of Jim Crow. But Sinners is a myth, not reality. Why not conjure another dream of a time when you could fight back? When you could have something when the world demanded you be happy with nothing, even for a moment?

There's much more on Sinners' mind than merely sharecropper vs White Supremacists. This movie recognizes the full breath of the racial caste system in the United States. We have a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yoa) who operate two separate grocery stores in the town, one on the Black side of the street, one on the White side, and we travel between these places in one long take. They get to be the "racial neutrality", fulfilling a key economic role that the color lines choke off. Then there's the question of "what are you?" when it comes to Stack's one-time-lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). She can pass for fully White and could live in that world, in safety. But she's not, she's multi-ethnic, and merely existing makes her a bomb ready to go off. You can't have a beautiful woman who looks White talking to a very dark-skinned Michael B. Jordan in public. Everybody knows what happens next. Meanwhile, in the darker spaces of our myth, there is a creature that passes for human. 

Wait, a minute. I'm this deep into Sinners and I have not mentioned the main character yet! That would Smoke and Stack's precocious teenage cousin, Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Canton), a talented young guitarist and soulful singer who is the secret weapon of the Juke Joint. We open Sinners in media res, with a bloodied, terrified Sammie walking into his father's church, his mind flashing back to the night of horrors that he has just barely survived. His father (Saul Williams) demands that his son put down his guitar, or what's left of it, rejecting the life of sin and music it represents, and returning to the faith. Then Preacher Boy has flashes of the Devilman, Remmick (Jack O'Connell), his mouth full of teeth and eyes aglow with evil. Uniquely amongst vampire movies, Christianity fails to banish the undead in Sinners. The Devil fell from heaven after all. Also, Christianity is the magic of the Europeans, imposed on their slaves, so how could it work here? There needs to be some other power.

That power ends up being music, and the conflict of Sinners is who gets to own it. What Preacher Boy does when he sings for the crowd is unleash mysticism more powerful than any other force in this film's mythology. He can transcend time and space, instrumentalizing the entire history of African and African American music traditions into one single moment of religious ecstasy. And not for nothing is the song he's singing, 'I Lied to You', about rejecting his father's church and embracing a new path of "sin". Historically, there has been no stream of culture more heavily fought over than the ownership of Black music. As generations pass, it all gets absorbed into neutral, colorless "American music". In genres like rock or country, you'd never from where it started. You can trace the path of Delta Blues across a century from obscure Black artists like Robert Wilkins or Bo Carter to eventually James Dolan, the White talentless owner of the New York Knicks. We can't quite murder James Dolan in a movie (yet) so for now, Remmick will represent the consuming force of integration gone wrong, integration as erasure.

Remmick can quote the Lord's Prayer right back at you. However, he cannot sing like Preacher Boy. The man can sing very damn well: he comes with his own Irish ballads and can make his ghouls dance along. "The Rocky Road to Dublin" has never been so terrifying. Sharecroppers and even the White people Remmick converts are singing songs they would not know, in accents they do not have. One wonders if perhaps Remmick is not even Irish, if there was a Sinners prequel where he devoured that folk tradition first. If Sinners goes one way, you'll have a vampire with a White face singing with a Black voice. And maybe that doesn't sound so horrible, I like Rick Astley, Elvis is Elvis, I don't even hate Snow. There is the promise of the Melting Pot, or some colorless future where we can all be one people, as one vampire says. But also, we won't be one people, it won't ever be equal. It will merely be a great tradition, a great people, digested and destroyed.

Sinners has a chance of being my favorite movie of this entire decade. It is great fun, the songs be them Blues or Irish hit every dang time, you got vampires riverdancing. The script is fantastic. The screen drips with eroticism, be it Preacher Boy's bold first experience with a married woman or Hailee Steinfeld drooling into Michael B. Jordan's mouth. "I want to taste you." It's sweaty, it's raw, it's glorifying liberation. There's great gore. One vampire spends much of the movie with his face torn off and he's still dancing along. There is not a weak link in the cast. I have not had time to mention Wunmi Mosaku or Delroy Lindo or Jayme Lawson or Omar Benson Miller, and they're all perfect in Sinners. The ideas Sinners has on its mind are really interesting and complicated. It would be good enough to just be a big dumb movie about sexy people killing vampires. May nobody say that From Dusk Till Dawn does not rule! Then Sinners just does it better, with deeper ideas, and music that will be eternal.

...

So 2025 is not quite over. Stand up this week for the Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff. Don't think I won't find a space to talk about Frankenstein.

EDIT (1/29): Post-script: I spoke with my uncle and Grandma did get to see this movie before she passed away. I was worried she might have missed it. Vampires and long spooky nights were definitely her thing.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 2 - The Monkey

2. The Monkey, dir. Osgood Perkins

The Monkey is a movie I never expected out of Oz Perkins. Imagine of Celine Song's next movie were to be a boner comedy, that's how much of a radical shift left of the dial that this is. Perkins' career so far has been a series of sullen, enigmatic horror films. He's had moderate hits here or there, usually too dense for a wide audience. Which is what made 2024's wild success of Longlegs so inexplicable to me. Heck of a marketing campaign for that one, I guess. Perkins has done pastiches or direct adaptations of many horror writers like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Harris, the Brothers Grimm, so it seems inevitably he would cover Stephen King eventually. I just didn't expect him to go so silly with it. This director has been a lot of things: irrelevant shock comedy is definitely a new one. 

Perkins decided to out Final Destination-Final Destination. However, making a black comedy gross-out work in The Monkey does not preclude this movie from being very personal to him. Longlegs was a response to his father, horror legend Anthony Perkins' own closeted sexuality and death from AIDS-related complications. The Monkey is a response to an even more shocking loss, his mother, Berry Bereson's death in the 9/11 attacks. It sounds like a bad 2007 internet humor joke: "your dad died of AIDS, your mom died on 9/11, haha". To borrow the line of a character in The Monkey: "shit, man, that sucks". (The Monkey is the kind of movie to have a character whose only role in the script is to say that one line about twelve times.)

What else can you do with a life history that was, to use the correct term, absolutely fucked except find a way to laugh at it?

The Monkey is about two twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convey as children, Theo James as adults) who have just reached their nastiest phase of middle school puberty. They discover an inheritance from their long absent, probably dead father (Adam Scott in one scene), a magical evil wind-up toy monkey that kills people once you turn its crank. And yeah, the verbal metaphor for masturbation is not lost on this movie - "he's playing with his monkey!" teases Bill to the entire class to humiliate his brother Hal. One of the first victims is Hal and Bills' babysitter, Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer). This happens as she takes the boys out for a nice meal, and is visibly aroused by a hibachi chef. The two boys are not yet able to fully process this show of adult sexuality. Then they never get a chance to, because the Monkey slams his cymbals together and much of Annie's head splits in half. The get more Freudian, the Shelburn twins are jealous for their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany)'s affection, and well, crank the Monkey with terrible results.

And yeah, I did say Annie Wilkes - she's that Annie Wilkes, Kathy Bates from Misery. I'm not really sure what to do with that, does not seem anything. There was a ton of Stephen King adaptations in 2025: some really bad (that IT series), some really good (The Long Walk), some simply not interesting (The Running Man remake). The Monkey feels like the most King-like(?)/Kingly of them all. It is unfaithful to the source material, though actually by deviating, Perkins made it more idiosyncratically Stephen King. He put more King than King had in there.

The original short story The Monkey is based on is not one of King's best or his most memorable. It does not go to the level of cartoon horror that Perkins takes it to. (For instance, he casts himself as the boys' uncle, and we're told after his wild and elaborate death death, his body looked like smashed cherry pie, cut to the coroner opening up a body bag full of smashed cherry pie. Delightful.) That story is just about a father and son getting rid of an Evil Object, trying to overcome the family curse. You'd never guess that most of what is iconic King details were not there, that was Perkins adding them. The ribbing between Hal and Bill feels like the way King writes kids, all spectacular vulgarity and lewdness. Gallows humor is aplenty in King. The Monkey has a mother screaming while running in a circle in a circle as she pushes a pram that is completely on fire, and King's lone directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive has things like this.

Now if neither of those things sound funny to you, I don't think The Monkey is going to work for you.

The Monkey is the kind of movie where we get a classic Final Destination Rube Goldberg kill set-up: a pretty woman is about to jump into the motel pool, and a broken air conditioner means the water is dosed full of killer volts of electricity. You know what's coming: she drives in and screams and screams, maybe a gore effect. Except, you don't know what's coming. She doesn't electrocute herself, she explodes! The second her body touches that pool, she's goes out like a fire cracker. How does that make sense? I don't know. Why was a woman swimming at 2 AM anyway all alone at night? This movie sets up a wedding skydiving service, and you better believe that card is going to get played. If you think The Monkey has hit the limit of how gonzo it will get, you're wrong, it has just one more gag up its sleeve.

Hal and Bill never learn to work out death. (Though who does, really?) Hal grows up to work in a supermarket with a very distant teenage son, Petey (Colin O'Brien) who is about to be legally adopted by another man. Bill makes... I won't spoil it, but he makes different life choices. They're both living gruesomely incomplete, terribly lonely lives since their mother passed and they hid the Monkey down a well. Only the Monkey the back, of course. At the beginning of the movie, Lois tells the boys "everybody dies, and that's life". It's the second time hear something like this. The Monkey comes in a box with an engraving saying it is "Like Life". Not 'lifelike' but "Like Life", choosing the wording carefully. Life is temporary, fleeting, confusing, incredibly painful, and then it's over and really nobody knows what to say, especially the extremely young pastor at the funeral who seems like he just got hired at this job ten minutes ago. Or is high as hell. Or both.

What else can we do but turn out traumas into Troma exploitation? The boys grew up and forgot their mother's most important lesson, "The hell with it, let's go dancing." They never danced, and they did not adjust well. There's a lot of movies that wallowed in a lot of feelings in this Top 15, but I knew, The Monkey had to be the highest ranked when it comes to my favorite subject lately: death. You gotta learn to take it in stride, have a laugh, and make room to dance in the face of oblivion. Because oblivion is coming anyway, so why be miserable?

... 

But of course, The Monkey is not the best movie of 2025. We have one more to go. The competition was not close. The last one laps the field. I don't think you'll be surprised by my choice.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 3 - Superman

3. Superman, dir. James Gunn

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I gave Man of Steel too much shit. Zach Snyder isn't history's greatest monster. Was his movie really an omen that everything I thought good about America was doomed and we were on a path to madness? I mean, yeah, turns out I was right, but that wasn't Man of Steel's fault! That movie was just a complete fucking piece of shit, top to bottom. It didn't end democracy. To call our depiction of Superman as some kind of barometer of the state of the country at large was silly of me. We have a great Superman movie now and you'd never believe how bad things are right now.

Still can you imagine being Zach Snyder right now? I don't think I could show my face in public! Imagine being the guy who made Man of Steel thinking you were smarter and could "fix" this character for a cynical modern audience who didn't want to be lectured about right and wrong. Then you failed completely, and you get to sit down and watch somebody else go ahead and just make... Superman. Turns out all we needed was Superman all along. This movie seems effortless. The action is great, the characters are wonderful, its goofy in the right ways, Superman has a dog! You'd never believe Man of Steel could have happened after watching Superman. 

Superman is black and white morality, always has been. Superman the movie presents this pressure of complicating the issue. The last son of Krypton (David Corenswet)'s own girlfriend, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) grills him in an interview, playing the hard-hitting journalist. This is just on the heels of stopping a war involving Not-Russia clearly about to invade Not-Palestine (a sorta medley of just-disguised-enough 2025 geopolitics). The journalist in the room is pushing objectivity and demanding answers, "who is Superman to do any of this?" and Superman is not media savvy enough to come up with a response. You leave this scene thinking our hero is untested and unsure. Except, Superman was right, even here, even when he loses the debate. What a perfect statement about the state of media right now, with journalists wasting their time trying to push a "balanced" viewpoint, so busy with appearance of un-bias that they're useless, in forced blindness to reality.

I guess we should be happy there even is still a newspaper media in Metropolis. It is sorta charming for any of what they do to matter. 

The villain of Superman is Elon Musk, a guy everybody learned to hate in 2025. Even Donald Trump got sick of his shit. I mean, sorry, the villain is the totally fictional character, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), a man who knows exactly how to play the media, the government, and even Superman. Where Superman sees the best in everybody, Lex sees what is useful to him and what is not. There's a whole cult of Luthor freaks following him around, worshiping him as a god that he very much isn't. The actual god, the super man people brings together and promises us that better things are possible. Lex gets his power from telling us nothing is real or good, or even possible except him.

Superman is not an origin story, if anything this is a remake of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. We open with Superman already out here, fighting big weird stuff. We're in full Silver Age comic book swing. One positive of twenty years of the MCU is that superhero movies can just be themselves, they do not need to bother explaining or justifying any part of their genre anymore. There's a Green Lantern (Nathan Fillon), this alien guy has elemental powers (Anthony Carrigan), there's a big Stitch-Godzilla thing. Don't worry about it. James Gunn's best joke is having an important Lois and Clark conversation framed against while a window while in the background the other superheroes fight some space creature from another dimension. It isn't important. that's just life in Metropolis these days. 

I'm impressed by how much James Gunn kept Superman a James Gunn movie. His whole career has been about misfit failed superheroes, The Specials to Super to Guardians of the Galaxy, so you'd worry he'd lose something when depicting the ur-superhero here. However, in a way, Superman is a weird misfit too. Even the most perfect man alive is kind of a dork who says things like "maybe that's the real punk rock" when confronted with thinking too many people are too good.

James Gunn is really good at pulling the heart strings. Superman's struggle for identity and family is as powerful as anything else Gunn has done. I think I cried harder at this than the little animal guys suffering in Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I almost cried telling people about Superman's ending and how perfect it was. I might cry now thinking about it. 

Not to spoil anything, but we are not our histories. We are not our ancestors. Let's say Superman is once again a metaphor for America. Well, he doesn't need to be defined by whatever happened before, neither do we. America today is not the nation of slave owners, capitalists, racists, and con artists, unless we let it. We are not the sum total of all the sins of the past and doomed to suffer in guilt and punishment, and cursed to repeat endless cycles. Recognizing what is wrong and what was a lie is one thing, but still we can be anything, even the illusions we thought we were. We can be fucking Superman. We can defeat evil and be the greatest society in history. Better things are possible, even at this late date.

There's a lot of awful emotions in the world and a lot of pain to work through, maybe we need a movie that is good, bright, and offers better worlds like Superman.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 4 - Marty Supreme

4. Marty Supreme, dir. Josh Safdie

You watch Marty Supreme and you wonder how this little wormy fucker is getting away with it. The Safdies (or well, Safdie singular now, I guess) have/has made an entire career out of guys whose lives are frenetic unstable horrors. This is a specific type of New York guy, you can consider them the Safie (singular) Hero. They cause all kinds of damage all around them, and all of it was for nothing to begin with. Connie will never get back to robbing banks with his brother in Good Time, in Uncut Gems the rock Howard thinks will solve all his problems is not worth half of his claims. These guys burn through every credit line, be it financial or social, which would be deeply humiliating if they were capable of shame. As they sink deeper and deeper, they wander off into tangential sidequests that get them only further form the goal, spreading yet more chaos.

The thing with Marty Supreme is that uniquely amongst these Safdie (singular) Heroes, Marty (Timothée Chalamet) has a there there. This was not entirely quixotic. Marty Mauser is a great athlete, he actually can do everything he promises - or at least 99.99% of it. Maybe table tennis isn't the most glamorous of sports compared to say, football, but it still can be incredible on the screen. The Safdie (singular) is showing that Marty is capable of superhero things with a paddle and a ball. Mr. Supreme doesn't win the championship in England, since otherwise there would be no movie. However, winning second place is pretty damn impressive. In any other circumstance other than Marty's, it would be very profitable. Being just as good as your arrogance has a draw back though, because our boy cannot imagine failure to the point he isn't ready for a real challenge. Another athlete, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) gets to live the dream, and he wasn't half as obnoxious on the way to getting there.

Marty's most tragic flaw is that he's a great on the mic, and great on the table, but he's a terrible conman. That's a bad trio of traits to have. There is not a single lie he tells, a single shortcut he takes, a single scheme he runs that does not result in further problems for him. All the Safdie (singular) Heroes are digging their own graves, all of it is avoidable. They could turn back and be forgiven at any time. At worst, Marty can live a solid working class life in 1950s New York with a close family, friend circle, and a job at his uncle's shoe store he hates, though won't ever get fired from. With some patience he could be back winning tournaments. Instead Marty robs his uncle for plane money, dumps a huge hotel bill with his ping pong event organizers, gets his female best friend, Rachel (Odessa A'zion) pregnant, and then doesn't take responsibility for any of this. When all these bills come due at the same time, Marty goes on a crime epic of increasingly stupid stunts, trying to do more bad cons to make up the ground his failures cost him. It is all one step forward, three steps back.

Like, crime is bad, sure. However, sometimes it does pay and pay very well. Not for Marty, he sucks at it.

Marty is going to cause a great deal of ruckus in his weeks' long adventure to try to get out of Manhattan and onto a flight to Tokyo to try to compete in his second table tennis tournament. He's sort of an inverse Inside Llewyn Davis, where both period piece heroes are stuck in their own traps, unable to escape from their cycles of recurring errors. Davis thanks to severe depression and Marty thanks to alarming levels of self-esteem. One is chasing after a cat, the other is chasing after a dog. Only Marty Supreme is way more chaotic. Even taking a shower causes the bathtub to crash through the floor onto an old man (Abel Ferrara)'s arm.

I guess I get it. Marty does have his boyish charms, he is played by Timothée Chalamet, only slightly uglied by some pockmark make-up and a mustache I'm not sure about. He can charm his way into Rachel's heart or the bed older movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow). You can even see why cuckholded rich husbands (a stunt-casted Kevin O'Leary) cannot throw Marty out with the trash. There's braggadocio mixed with a paradoxical ptiy. He calls his talent a "burden" at one point, as if he were the Kwisatz Haderach of ping pong. I don't think anybody is fooled by Marty, he only gets by because they see right through him. If he were a better conman, he'd be truly all alone.

Marty Supreme feels huge despite being about one scumbag. It's a shame is that the Safdie (singular) only shoots two or three big table tennis sequences. You want more. There's much more movement, space, and action than you'd think possible with just a little table and a net. Marty is running around stages and venues, making incredible shots. If you just measure your movie by how much is in it, how much really awesome stuff you get for the price of admission, Marty Supreme is one of the best of 2025. From a recreation of Lower East Side Jewish New York to dancing in the road next to a moving car to goofs with the Harlem Globetrotters to a shoot out with Penn Jillette, the Safdie (singular) has delivered a feast here. There's even a vampire in this movie!

A critical conversation in Marty Supreme happens with Marty's fellow Jewish ping-ponger, Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig). Marty has Bela recount a story from the Holocaust to impress a person at lunch. In the story, Bela finds a honeycomb out in the woods, smokes out the bees, smears honey all over his body, and lets the prisoners in his cabin lick his entire body. You can see the awful grin on Marty's face here. He hears this story and loves it, for the wrong reasons: the shock value, the perversion, the weirdness. What Bela did was much more than that. He was using his body in this motherly act of caring for other people in impossible circumstances, granting them sustenance and sweetness for could very well be the final time.

We end Marty Supreme with none of our boy's lofty ambitions achieved. Whether he deserves it or not, he is given another chance. And in the final scene of this movie, Marty might unlock the parts of him that are missing. He might finally understand why you would let dying people lick the honey off your chest.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 5 - The Shrouds

5. The Shrouds, dir. David Cronenberg

My two favorite directors of all time are guys named Dave. One of these Daves, Lynch, passed away last January. In the last Top 15 I had to ditch a review of Dune 2 to talk about his legacy and one of my favorite movies of all time. The other Dave, Cronenberg, made one of the best movies of 2025, a bleak statement of mourning and his own mortality. Nobody knows how many more films the Elder Cronenberg has in him. The Shrouds consciously acts as a finale. This could be it. Dave's farewell is troublesome, disturbing, and somehow made greater by its incompleteness. You could not ask for a more proper swan song considering Dave's body of work.

Vincent Cassel is playing Dave. I mean, sorry, he's playing "Karsh", an aging Toronto-based widower who favors black clothing and has striking gray hair. Probably just a coincidence. At one point in his career, Karsh was a director of "acclaimed technical films". Now he has moved on to a unique SciFi premise to deal with his grief. Cronenberg/Karsh both lost their wives of many decades in the recent past. The fictional version has transformed her body into a kind of art piece, just as our director has transformed his confusion and grief into The Shrouds. The SciFi concept we're given is that you can wrap your loved one's corpse in a high-tech burial shroud, allowing you to see a 3D model of their body. There is a fancy graveyard with screens and bodies within. But also, on your phone, you can pull up the corpse and see the process of decomposition in real time. Apparently there is comfort in watching the remains transform from recognizably your loved one to a mummified approximation, to a dried out ecosystem of lingering bacteria and parasites, to the final reclamation by nature into true nothingness. 

Many of Cronenberg's films have been about doubles or a mirrors of identity (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, etc). His stories are often a dreamlike cycle where characters appear and re-appear. That is also all over The Shrouds. Karsh is haunted by memories of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). What had to be months of a terrible slow illness is depicted in his mind as one night. His nude wife walks in and out of their bedroom on the doctor's orders, each time returning with parts of her body taken. Becca is gone at the start of the film, though she reappears in many guises in The Shrouds. There is her cool hippie sister, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger). Karsh has an AI assistant on his phone, Hunny, who is the spitting image of his wife. Even other women that Karsh starts a relationship with, such as the mysterious Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) become echoes of Becca, her body somehow carrying the same scars.

There's something to this sense of mourning as amputation. I think of the people I lost as being like a missing limb. (The resonance is not lost on me, before the end my Grandma had to have a leg cut off.) And just like adjusting to a lost body part, you have to accept a new reality where there are things you cannot do, patterns of conversation you cannot have any longer. The pain of mourning is almost a phantom limb syndrome, as your nervous system struggles to adjust to processing to a new world with somehow much less data. You can find yourself stuck in time, living both in the present and the past. New people who come into your life can feel to be echoes of people who are gone. There are ghosts everywhere if you look for them.

There is also a movie here. The Shrouds is in theory a tech thriller. Karsh is stuck in a confusing web of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. Somebody is sabotaging his tech company just on the eve of a major expansion. Is it the Chinese? Is it the Russians? Is it these growths on Becca's bones that Karsh cannot explain? Was she some bizarre medical experiment? Is this all an invention of Karsh's best friend and Terry's ex-husband, Maury (a very disheveled Guy Pearce)? Is Maury jealous of Karsh or is he jealous of Terry when they sleep together? Why does everybody keep talking about going to Budapest?

At one point, The Shrouds was going to be a Netflix series. Two episodes were planned at one point, The Shrouds seems to be the remnants of those scripts. I'm reminded of the other Dave's great movie, Mulholland Drive. They're both pilot episodes that gesture at a greater narrative that will never happen, with various plot threads torn out and spilled all over the floor. However, Mulholland Drive ends up being a more complete work and a stronger statement about guilt, sexuality, and jealousy than if it had ever answered who was ruining Justin Theroux's movie. The Shrouds is more powerful because all its genre conventions are made utterly meaningless. None of the tensions ever get relieved by an answer. There's just the terrible uncertainty of what's coming. Nothing really does come, we're just left with Karsh being unable live in the past or the present by the time the movie concludes.

What does Budapest mean? I have no idea. It probably doesn't matter. We end the movie with Karsh on a flight there. Budapest is the place we all go, inevitably. With some things accomplished, some things unfinished, fewer answers than we'd want, and maybe, our loved ones still waiting for us in some form or another.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 6 - Weapons

6. Weapons, dir. Zach Cregger

A few years ago, The Whitest Kids U'Know guys reemerged from a decade of quiet, making a big push to promote their Youtube channel while they were all stuck at home during Covid anyway. As long as people were going to need to watch 'Sam in a Bag' or 'A Gallon of PCP', they might as well be making money off of it. One really cool thing on that channel was the creator commentaries they were doing, where all five of the guys would get on Zoom and remember filming the sketch almost twenty years ago now. Children often appeared in their comedy because they aimed for edge and shock. They guys were amazed by how much leeway they got from parents when it came to the child actors in their sketches. "Oh you'll give us $150 dollars to call our kid 'fuck face'? Sure!", paraphrased Trevor Moore. Makes one wonder if the entire industry of children actors is deeply fucked - I think I know the answer. Perhaps a little bit of that was on the Kids' minds too here too. Weapons is the final and most daring WKUK sketch, where children are put in danger as props, and yeah, it is hilarious.

The guys don't really do too many of these commentaries anymore. The energy just isn't the same with only four of them.

Director Zach Cregger has mentioned in interviews that Weapons came about after the sudden death of his co-creator Trevor in 2021. There's nothing explicitly autobiographical in Weapons (not like other movies I'll discuss soon). Instead we get in-jokes such as seven hot dogs on a plate, or a concerned mustachio'd neighbor looking suspiciously like Trevors' character in the 'Sniper Business' sketch. You could easily have never seen Whitest Kids U'Know and have no idea that one of the hottest horror directors of our day started with comedy. Cregger cut his teeth making embarrassing crap like Miss March. I greatly enjoyed Barbarian from a few years ago, that one was just a solid horror movie. The ending to Weapons is a punchline. This is the scariest horror movie of 2025, a really dark fairy tale, until we get what is pure comedy.

I have a theory about Cregger's writing process. Whenever he hits a wall with his story and doesn't know what to do next, he shifts perspectives, and writes in another character. In Barbarian half the movie happens before we smash cut to Justin Long in a sports car 1000 miles away from anything we've seen so far. This lets him reset the tension after a cliffhanger, build new momentum for another scare, then explore the problem from another direction without needing to answer anything yet. (And who knows if he knows where he's going until he gets there.)

Weapons has six chapters and six POVs, giving us a surprisingly wide view of this unnamed town where our events take place. We bounce back and forth through time, the various pieces adding up to clues to our mystery, until eventually we get the big reveal and you can start laughing after you've been terrified so far. The effect is like one of Stephen King's big town novels, The Tommyknockers or 'Salem's Lot, where something terrible has come into this place and the entire town, with all its flaws and socials divisions, are major elements of the story. This place is Anywhere, USA, sure, a kind of Urban Legend flair, which could be anywhere, even just two towns over for all you. That the narrator is a little girl's voice (Scarlett Sher) gives you the idea that you're being whispered some fable in the back of a bus on the way to summer camp. Everything eventually comes into place, except this narrator, she cannot be one of children, and cannot know what she knows.

What we're told is that seventeen children all ran away from home at exactly 2:17 AM one morning, this makes up the entity of a third grade classroom. The fact that one boy, Alex (Cary Christopher), arrived at school perfectly fine makes it all the more inexplicable. Their teacher, Justine (Julie Gardner) has been targeted by the bewildered and paranoid parents, who are certain she should know something, anything. What do entitled White suburbanites do these days the first second they're made to feel helpless? They target the authority figure in sight and conjure conspiracies theories. But Justine is our first POV, and indeed, she knows nothing at all. Somebody spray painted "witch" on the side of her car. 2:17 is less than 45 minutes off from the traditional Witching Hour. Hmm, something to think about.

One particularly violent and angry father, Archer (Josh Brolin) is tortured by dreams. Terrifying dreams. Some of them of are his son, some of them are of a horrible clown figure (the Future Best Supporting Actress Winner, Amy Madigan). One that goes unexplained by Weapons is a giant assault rifle floating in the sky over his house. This has nothing to do with any part of the mystery. Except the gun is a clue to what is on Weapons' mind as a work. We have decided that every person at every level of society is suspicious and corrupt, and that cynicism and disconnect will protect us. Except it doesn't. Entire classrooms of children do not get erased by the evil witches or the trans agenda or the people who took beef tallow out of your French Fries. They get erased by random terrible chance, one person with one gun. You can atomize society and decide nothing is real except your own individual homestead and your own vision of reality - and you'll be perfectly safe in that bubble until you realize other people have other realities, and nobody is protecting you or your children from the AR-15s knocking at the doors.

All this could have been avoided if just one neighbor looked into one house. The world's problems aren't solved by dividing ourselves. Eventually it will spill into your safe space. And yeah, it will be hilarious in the end. There will also be a lot of screaming.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 7 - The Secret Agent

5. The Secret Agent, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho

--Wait, wait, this title is a lie. And indeed, upon replay, the refs are throwing a flag here. That'll be a two point penalty for misleading marquees. The fans are booing, but it is the correct call.

Anyway, let's fix that number and move on:

7. The Secret Agent, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho

There is no cool action spy guy in The Secret Agent. This movie does have all the pieces for a stylish period spy thriller. Our main character (the handsome well-toned Wagner Moura) is traveling under a fake identity to the coastal city of Recife on the run from a corporate-government conspiracy. He is working with a resistance movement to reveal secrets, all while trying to smuggle himself out of the country with what's left of his family. But this movie has nothing like a Bond movie threat, there's no giant bomb or super weapon or impressive supervillain. Kleber Mendonca Filho is aiming for grounded and cynical, think the The French Connection not Mission Impossible. 

We don't have gadgets or a dirty puns or even all that important a conspiracy to unlock. It turns out all of this involves the misallocation of university funds by a government-run energy corporation based on racist perceptions of certain regions of Brazil. More importantly, this all involves one dinner where our hero and his proud wife were insufficiently deferential to the scumbag screwing them over. In the end, the dictatorship of Ernesto Geisel (who makes a cameo appearance as a portrait on the walls of the police station) is just about basic thuggery. Now that naked gangsterism has become the ultimate goal of the conservative movement in the United States, we should take a lesson here. The worst way to insult these people is to remind them their place in the world is unnatural, their power an aberration.

The first image of The Secret Agent is a rural gas station with a dead body lying in the dirt field, poorly covered by a sheet of cardboard. Wagner Moura as "Armando" is just about to leave when two policemen arrive. They're not here to deal with the corpse, that's somebody else's job. They're here to shake this stranger on the road in a beat-up VW Beetle down. Armando is totally broke, so this is not the payday they wanted. However, he shows enough respect to their power by offering cigarettes as a compromise token. Meanwhile, dogs nibble at the body, stinking in the tropical summer Sun.

Recife's chief of police, Euclides (Robério Diógenes) is himself busy in a complicated plot involving a student he murdered and a framed tiger shark. We never get the exact details of this crime, it is unrelated to Armando's problem, so we never learn who the victim was and why the police are so bad at this. Their little murder becomes a media sensation when the missing leg is rumored to have come alive and chases after gay men in the park. Armando (really named Marcelo) has a son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who is now obsessed with the movie Jaws playing at his grandfather's movie theater thank to the sensationalized news of a shark attacks.

The world keeps conjuring these wild monsters to explain itself: a killer shark, a killer leg, even the title is implying some genre adventure that The Secret Agent is decidely not. The real monsters are unapproachable and also too banal, just ugly crooks lording over their little Reichsgaue. The dictatorship is not even well-run, all its pieces crash into each other. Armando/Marcelo makes friends with Chief Euclides and his gaggle of large sons, meaning the dirt poor assassins here to erase a government enemy collide right with the local center of power. The chief and these assassins were out partying last night, they're on the same side, but nobody said that fascism had to be sophisticated or even have a plan. Euclides is a huge fan of a local German man, Hans (the late Udo Kier in his final role) because he thinks he's a Nazi war criminal. The chief is such a buffoon he doesn't notice that Hans has blue numbers tattooed on his arm. Brazil is full of refugees: Jews, Angolans, a gay boy, a wonderful elderly woman who did crimes against Mussolini back in the day, and finally our hero. It wasn't anything out of Stephen Spielberg that took away their homes.

Speaking of those Seventies movies, The Secret Agent is a gorgeous production. I do not know what Recife might have looked like in 1977, I have never been to Brazil in any time period, but the movie we see is a convincing recreation of a world from fifty years ago. Kleber Mendonça Filho keeps playing in the realm of blockbusters, with Jaws, a Dino De Laurentiis King Kong marquee, we see an audience screaming at The Omen, the movie is set the year Star Wars comes out. Even though none of those things existed, somehow they're better-remembered than the actual dramas playing out in real life. They're an easier-to-digest lie than the grimness of politics. There are no disembodied legs attacking people, there's just a bad police chief covered in festival glitter greedily taking his cut, who probably will never face any kind of justice no matter what happens to his dictator master.

The narrative of The Secret Agent cuts itself short in a severe unsatisfying fashion. The brutal tragedy of it isn't who got away or who didn't. It's that when we cut to the present, nobody can remember Armando/Marcelo, except some kids doing a research project. Nobody can understand what all this killing even was for. The past is gone, the good guys and bad guys alike. What gets best remembered, most crystalized, is that fifty years ago, as a little kid, we went out to see Jaws.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 8 - Bugonia

8. Bugonia, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

There are a cadre of directors whose work I will always be there for, no matter what. These names show up on these lists almost automatically: Aster, Baker, Guadagnino, Gunn, Nolan, Villeneuve, Wes Anderson, Eggers, and of course, Lanthimos. All these guys are prolific, they're all doing their best work this decade, and many of them have made Movies of the Year for me. However, I really was not sure if just being a Lanthimos movie gave you a ticket on the Top 15. I want to be sure that your movie is still Top Tier. You're not just doing the same thing again and I'm not just an easy mark. I don't want to write the same reviews every twelve months, nor do you want to read that. So I debated a lot about Bugonia, whether is "hangs", and well... circumstances kept pushing it up. Now it's Number Eight, right in the middle.

Bugonia left me howling with laughter as I walked out of the theater. Nobody today is hitting the final punchlines the way Lanthimos does, not even full-blooded comedies - Friendship's ending wasn't very funny. Lanthimos' 2024 movies, Kinds of Kindness was three short stories all building up to a final pay-off of pure hysteria. You might not think that Margaret Qualley singing badly on a casio keyboard is the funniest thing in history, but it is. Bugonia is in theory one of Lanthimos' darkest movies. It is a grimy movie that ends really poorly for most characters involved, and maybe even more poorly for a lot of people who were not involved. The tragic instrument is pushed so far that your brain short-circuits, you give up trying to understand anything, and what else can you do but laugh?

This is a remake of a 2003 Korean film (which I haven't seen) called Save the Green Planet! directed by Jang Joon-hwan. Both films are about a filthy conspiracy nut kidnapping a smartly-dressed pharmaceutical executive, based on no evidence except elaborate mythologies of alien invasion. Bugonia two makes a significant changes 1) shifting the setting from Korea to 2020s America and 2) the executive was male in the original, now she's played by Emma Stone. Our protagonist, Teddy (an alarmingly-thin Jessie Plemons) gets to be a stand-in for the entire galaxy of inexplicable incel internet realities that are dangerous to all sides of the political spectrum. Trump got lucky in 2024, Charlie Kirk did not. Teddy's politics are a maelstrom of environmentalism, anti-woke language, and RFK Jr-style quackery. Ultimately his psychology is about anger. He hates Emma Stone's character of Michelle Fuller, a beautiful, ruthless CEO. There's a reason Teddy has to chemically castrate himself and his autistic sidekick, Don (Aidan Delbis) to pull off this crime, to tear out points of "weakness" that women might use to dominate his imagined masculinity. Michelle does not even need to push on that point when she's fighting back: its too easy.

Teddy destroys part of himself, and he destroys part of Michelle, by shaving her hair and caking her skin with sunscreen. Emma Stone is playing this movie one step ahead of Teddy at all times. Which is not that hard to do considering the difference between them. He's living in filth on the fringes of society with bad skin and ill-fitting clothes, pulling off some master crime in an old creaky house. She's an CEO in a glass castle with servants, a fitness routine, and a trendy giant water bottle in her hand while driving to work. You can constrict thousands of words of lore to explain your definition of human versus inhuman. The truth is that Teddy is here to hurt people, specifically women, and Michelle is a good target.

Of course, Yorgos Lanthimos will complicate this story. You tempt a director like this with the prospect of filming some aliens, he's probably gonna get some aliens and make them very wacky. It would be easy if Teddy were just an asshole who was wrong about everything pulling off a comedy of errors doomed to fail. Unfortunately, he actually has competencies and is smarter than he looks. He just missed the most important question. You can assume anything from people you decided don't count as people. As a Jewish Guy, I know to watch out from this talk of Aliens and Lizard People, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are only a few threads away. Teddy decided that since he can do violence, he must be violent. Why should you hate Lizard People? I'd love to meet a Lizard Guy.

I don't see any reason to automatically hate somebody from Andromeda either, I bet they got good movies. Well, if this is who we are, we're gonna get what we deserve.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 9 - Bring Her Back

9. Bring Her Back, dir. Danny & Michael Philippou

Friendship was the most upsetting movie of 2025. But Bring Her Back has a good case for runner-up. And this time our movie is upsetting in the usual way bring about awful things happening to innocent, helpless people.

I sometimes forget how much of a horror pervert I am. I showed The Substance to some friends in 2025 and didn't realize that some people do not see the beauty in the glorification of body horror. A regular non-depraved person might just be disgusted by the disgusting. However, even I have limits, and Bring Her Back is getting close to too much for me. We're on the border of Lars von Trier levels of extreme unpleasantness with this one. Once you go beyond von Trier to French New Extreme, then you're out in spaces I do not want to travel. The Philippou twins hit the horror scene hard with their first movie Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back is doubling down on that movie's most intense elements. Their two movies are all about teenagers slamming hard into the occult, and nobody is safe, no matter how small.

There's a good bet that the third Philippou movie will not make my Top 15 if they keeps going this way.

A trend I've gotten really annoyed with in horror movies in 2025 was how many of them were set in Airbnbs. Nobody seems to live anywhere in horror movies anymore. There's no sense of character or place. Companion or Death of a Unicorn or even Keeper (most of whom are movies I liked) are not about their spaces. The space they're set in only exists to be far away from civilization. They're generically Not-Here, or put it another way, Nowhere. These are not the Overlook Hotel, they're cheap places to film and maybe an excuse for a bad cell signal in your script. Bring Her Back is set in a Somewhere - an unpleasant Somewhere certainly. Yet still a place with an identity, maybe even more so than the house from No Other Choice. This house is off-kilter, everything is an angle, with a long history of what appear to be additions. It is no longer its architect's original vision, it is some fusion of several different ideas into a mess of concepts. This is not just a house to be a house, it is a document of a person's life, an accumulation of things and rubbish and details, such as the wall of dusty knick-knacks or the unfashionable carpets or the beaded curtains or the taxidermy dog. Our home owner, Laura (Sally Hawkins) puts on a brave face of normality. But the house gestures at questions she does not want to answer. What is going on with that filthy empty pool in the backyard?

Another clue might be her foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who has an unmentioned "something" happening to him. It is the kind of thing you avoid of politeness, yet can never possibly not notice. He never speaks. His head is growing larger and larger. His eyes are changing colors. And what is he doing with that knife -oh my pancake-flipping Christ, that was a fucking lot! Oh my God, that was extreme, movie. Fuck me.

Bring Her Back starts very badly for its two leads. Those are siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong). They're coming into this house with a great deal of baggage and pain with an abusive father who dies in a sudden graphic way right at the start of this movie. (Don't be surprised when things stay at this register of bad.) Laura is an experienced state councilor so can pass appearances as a good, honest social worker. She can be, at best, your cool aunt or big sister, trendy and understanding, though at times too much like a friend than a parent. She's suffering from trauma herself, which she's open about. However, is that a path for connection or is she using her own pain to further manipulate you? It is a great performance from Hawkins. She can talk past you in a way that you'll not notice the occult spells she's drawing around her house. Bring Her Back is a movie about some kids who got a bad deal in life and are about to get a much worse one. Sometimes the world is not going to give you a chance to heal from a psychic wound. The demons can smell your injury - and they're hungry.

The real crux of cruelty comes in the third act of Bring Her Back. We get a glimmer of hope, one you know is not going to succeed. You haven't seen the demon's final form yet, the movie can't end. However, maybe one of the kids can get away, maybe Laura's undoing will start here. There is a set-up early in on in Bring Her Back, where Andy lightly crashes his car and his side view mirror falls onto the ground in the driveway of the house. It is still there an hour later. If you know how movies and stories work, that's usually the narrative setting up some important tool to be used later in the film. Chekhov's side view mirror, if you will. Only Bring Her Back is not leaving some Key Item to save the day, in fact, it is more cruel if you know the tropes. Your expectations will be punished. We still have more movie to go, and things will get much worse before they even get close to getting better.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 10 - Friendship

10. Friendship, dir. Andrew DeYoung

Seinfeld mined a lot of comedy about how difficult it was to start new friendships as an adult. "Whoever you have in your life by then, that's who you're going with: you're not interviewing, you're not looking at new applications. 'Sorry, I'm not hiring'." At least for me, I'm not sure if that's true because it isn't like I was ever that great at making or maintaining relationships. (If you're reading this and we haven't talked in ten, twenty, thirty years, it wasn't personal, I'm just not a guy who has the courage to make plans, I'd hang whenever, sorry.) A lot of people tried to join the core Seinfeld group and the unlucky ones ended up dead of letter glue poisoning. What that show didn't mine was the inverse of that situation: there is nothing more than brutal than being the tangent invited into a friend circle. There's inside jokes that you don't know, stories that make no sense if you weren't there, you don't know how aggressive the teasing might be, that weird little guy might be jealous of you(?), please let there be a dog whose love is totally unconditional that we can focus on instead. Maybe we all are better off alone forever instead of trying to suffer.

I know I bring up a lot of horror movies on these lists. Some people can't do it, for me those are easy watches. I'll take a zombie eating people any day of the week - no matter how messy their table manners - over anything that's socially awkward. Friendship was the most physically painful watch of a movie I've experienced in some time. Not since Ingrid Goes West have I given myself a bruise in my thigh from pinching it to try to overcome the 20,000 roentgens per second of cringe. And just like Ingrid Goes West, Friendship a movie about a sociopath's desire to be accepted, to have somebody else's life, while you yourself are completely empty. It got so bad with Friendship at one point that I walked out of the theater and pretended I needed to use the restroom.

Don't ever say I don't let cinema challenge me.

That said, this is the only out-and-out comedy on this list. Friendship has the single best scene of any movie in 2025. I was laughing for a full five minutes after it happened. By this point in the movie, our hero, Craig (Tim Robinson) has already done a thorough job of destroying his life while trying to connect with his cool weatherman neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd). He's tried and failed multiple times to recreate magical moments he had with his buddy before he alienated him, which has resulted in Craig poisoning himself, losing his job, and nearly getting his wife Tami (Kate Mara) killed. Now alone, Craig looks for any meaning at all, any answer, and goes to a drug dealer kid in the back of a phone store, who has some exotic hallucinogenic toad. "It's time for you to touch God", says the kid, before Craig takes a lick.

I won't spoil what he sees. Let's just say that Craig does not find God. In fact, all we see is how utterly empty he is. At the very core of his psychology, in the deepest depths of his soul, there's no beauty, no spirit, nothing special. The totality of Craig amounts to mere mundane daily cravings. He's an incomplete person, a squealing baby desiring milk with no real interest in other humans besides 'this one gives me food'. I don't think any other genre but comedy could manage to so completely destroy its protagonist like this. It's so sad, what else can you do? Laugh your ass off. "The toad ripped me off!" Maybe at the end Craig learns a lesson, maybe he's gained some ability to understand that other people exist, but along the day, he's going to do a lot of damage.

Sure, there is a tragedy in the inability to hang. Tim Robinson, already not superhero movie pretty like Kate Mara or Paul Rudd, has bad posture and can never seem to be comfortable in his body, as if his giant winter coat was a shell and he was a turtle. Everybody has failed to hang at some point in their life. But if you're going to connect with people, it cannot be like this, this parasitic feeding off of their perceived charisma. You can slam into a glass door like an idiot and remember that moment for the rest of your life, the things that flash before your eyes that torture you. Do you truly fear your deepest darkest sins, or what a cringy memory? You don't need the power of hang to be likeable. You need the power of even once having something interesting to say.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 11 - No Other Choice

11. No Other Choice, dir. Park Chan-wook

I am so happy I found this particular image for my review of Park Chan-wook's newest movie, No Other Choice (releasing wide, in fact, today). I remember seeing this shot and its three part composition: a red highway where the actual action takes place, a green ocean, and a rock formation in the center dividing the frame and thinking "now that is movie-making right there". It blew me away. It might be the single best shot of any movie in 2025. There are a lot of interesting geometrical compositions in No Other Choice. It is the second best-shot movie of 2025. Director photography Kim Woo-hyung is knocking it out of the park (Chan-wook) here.

If you're a fan of scene transitions, No Other Choice is your movie. There are at least half a dozen truly incredible ones. We see a close-up of our lead, Lee Byung-hun's face, and you notice a light shining on his cheek. Then we do a dissolve to the next shot, a scene at night , with the bright patch in the actor's face matched to a flashlight held up the camera. This is a magic trick, the movie flipping the light source 180 degrees. Another brilliant one is a shot of the wife (Son Ye-jin) and the teenage son (Woo Seung Kim) in this movie, both standing in the garden, shot looking down at them from above. They're together happily discussing how it was all a misunderstanding, the head of this family isn't a murderer. Why that's a pig buried there, not a person, how silly. Only what we're seeing is framed through a brick diamond-shaped decoration on the roof. We get a reverse shot of the actors sitting on the roof together, seemingly looking down at themselves. Now there's no smiles. The real family knows the truth, and down there, through this portal, is the lie they're going to have to live with from now on.

No Other Choice is an adaptation of a 1997 Donald Westlake novel, The Ax. I'm to understand that it is a bleak but satirical crime thriller, a usual from this author since Westlake was the prolific master of hardboiled crime fiction. (And I'll confess I'm only aware of his work through his influence on Stephen King.) In both versions of the story, our hero is a middle-aged paper manufacturing manager who loses his job and realizes that in the downsizing job market, the only job security can be found through murdering the competition. Chan-wook's version is about Yoo Man-su (Byung-hun), the once "Pulp Man of the Year", perhaps a nod to the pulp fiction roots of our story.

You'd think paper as an industry would be the most soul-sucking and emotionally inert trade you could imagine. It's paper! It's junk! It's literally what we use to wipe our asses with. But No Other Choice shows love for that industry and that craft. We see Man-su lovely feeling a roll of textile. "We used to build shit in this country", and such, you could have pride in a roll of toilet paper as much as you could have pride in any other object you create. Sadly, the big money is never in creating, is it?

We start our movie with Man-su having reached a perfect place in his life to his perspective. He's happily married, has overcome his alcohol problems, has two dogs, has two kids, a hot wife, and has even bought his family home back. The house is an interesting character in of itself, its layers and concrete balconies are both a gorgeous example of architecture - a home to die for - and also gives this family drama a lot of verticality. I'm reminded of the snowy ski lodge home in Anatomy of a Fall, where so much of the drama of the movie is about what you can see or hear, or what you can plausibly claim you didn't see or hear. And for such a cool, instantly iconic space, Man-su does most of his adventuring outside, out in the hills or streets - or even inside the homes of his rivals. Life rarely lets us stay perfectly happy for very long, at least without doing a lot of damage to keep things from changing.

One could easily have drawn Man-su as this predatory patriarch, living out some sexist fantasy of what a man could and should be. So much of his struggle is emasculating, losing the security of a job, groveling meekly to friends and would-be employers to give him a chance, all while his wife flirts dangerously close to an affair. We see entire Self Help groups of the newly unemployed masses of Korean aging men, being told mantras of their self-worth and positivity of the future. Man-su could be a Walter White or a Jack Torrence, who must be the Man at all times, dominating their space with endless violence. But Man-su is not an alpha nor is he trying to be one. Lee Byung-hun is playing him as a friendly neighborly fellow, most of his murdering is a comedy of errors and delays. He isn't hiding his insecurities under a strong man identity, Man-su will use vulnerability as his most dangerous weapon. What horrors Man-su does to his family are a lot more subtle than an ax to a bathroom door.

The capitalist satire is not subtle. You will not leave No Other Choice without knowing exactly what things Park Chan-wook hates and what has gone wrong with the global economy. However, sometimes the fucking message needs to be said, if not yelled, and yelled very loudly. No Other Choice is proof that a scream can be artful too.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 12 - 28 Years Later

12. 28 Years Later, dir. Danny Boyle

The original 28 Days Later looks like shit. It is still a good movie, but those early digital films have aged into gnarly pieces of work. In Danny Boyle's defense, shooting digitally gave his movie this rough, underground feeling, like a 16mm grindhouse movie. 28 Years Later sees Boyle experimenting to a less dramatic effect. The whole thing is shot on iPhone 15, which is certainly not typical for mainstream movie-making, however it is still an advanced tool in its own right. You won't confuse 28 Years Later's cinematography for any other movie. There is an interesting effect where Boyle and his DP, Anthony Dod Mantle, sorta figured out their tech as the movie went along. The grimy 2025 digital sheen evolves during the course of the movie to being less confrontational to audience expectations. By the end, 28 Years Later looks rather conventional. 

We end on a movie that is brighter, less claustrophobic, with a clearer focus. Boyle uses a technique of 'collage', quite a bit early on, where the adventures are inter-cut with stock footage of medieval longbows and castles. Again, this him acting like a dirty punk director, as if his movie is crudely glued-together and pieces of it might just fall out. As our protagonist get a clearer sense of himself and his mission in the world, we lose those elements. The contrast helps illustrate an important point: 28 Years Later is two different movies, one being the zombie sequel you expected, the other being a movie nobody saw coming.

In first half we have a British folk horror zombie movie, a clever direction for this franchise to go. Spike (Alfie Williams) is part of a survivor community in an island off the mainland, his people having out-lasted the zombie plague thanks to lucky geography. He's just a kid, so has no memory of any pre-apocalyptic world. The first act is Spike taking on his first hunt with his father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), giving him his first look at what is outside the isolation of his village. Just as humans have adapted, becoming semi-feudal warriors, so have the zombies. They're now The Last of Us-inspired classes of monster, with slow, easy to avoid scavengers or big brutish alphas (with some extremely questionable racial politics going on there). That's all thrilling, capped off with a great chase sequence set in the backdrop of an impossibly star-studded night sky.

Then the second half is something else. Spike goes on a second journey with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer). I won't spoil in great detail what happens here, because this is where my own life interrupts the review. Yeah, things are getting sad again.

The zombies as a monster is all about death, but only in the abstract sense, not in any specific or personal way. You're titillated by the idea of a survivalist aftermath more than you miss the world that was. (How many times have you had the conversation "what retail store will you live in after the zombies come?") That's when 28 Years Later shocks us by reminding us that yes, all these ghouls you're sniping for points were people. They were not simply an indistinguishable mass of mindless inhumanity: they had pasts, and lives, and somebody needs to treat the dead with respect. We get that through, of all things, palliative care, with heroes accepting inevitability. That the best thing we can do for our loves ones sometimes is not more treatment, but making them comfortable, letting go, and saying goodbye.

I saw 28 Years Later the day before my grandmother died. (She would have liked this movie, btw.) My sister and I went out to the movies for a distraction while Grandma was in the hospital and in a very bad condition. We were already preparing for her to have a greatly reduced level of life if she survived this latest illness. We just wanted a distraction and to see people run from spooky zombies. Instead 28 Years Later ended up being a reflection on our very circumstances. My sister hates this movie, it was a bad call for her. I loved it. This is not "the movie I needed that day", no movie would ever fix anything, but it was at least some comfort from the world of cinema to tell me that I was understood. That what I was feeling was universal. These tough decisions are coming for all of us You don't often go to a movie to feel 'seen' by it, but that was my experience here. After I saw this, Grandma got out of surgery, muttered a bit to the nurses, and she seemed at peace for the first time in a week. She passed away the next day, her strength having finally given out. Even if she only had one more good night on this Earth, that time matters. She got a good night's rest, and for all I know, dreamed good dreams.

So I don't know if that's "fair" for this movie to have all that baggage. However, we don't do fairness here; I never pretended otherwise. The review is the review.

Obviously I'll see The Bone Temple, the sequel, which is out the very day I'm posting this. The first 28 Years Later movie ends on such a wild, hysterical tone shift of a cliffhanger that I gotta see what happens next. However, there is no universe where the next movie is makes nearly as brave of choices, or gets close to mattering nearly as much. Will it even have as bold of choices in cinematography?

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 13 - Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc

13. Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, dir. Tatsuya Yoshihara

There's a good chance you did not watch the Chainsaw Man anime or read the manga, so you might be a bit overwhelmed jumping into this movie without context. Luckily that context is pretty simple: there's a kid named Denji (Kikunosuke Toya) who has the power to become a superhero with chainsaw hands. Japan is overrun with demons with dangerous, often-absurd powers, and the government has organized a vague yet sinister organization to hunt them down. Denji is being used by said agency and its enigmatic head, Makima (Tomori Kusunoki). He's a horny dumbass, basically what happens if Phillip J. Fry could cut monsters in half with his teeth. Worse, he's surrounded by women each with as much enigmatic danger to fill a Park Chan-wook movie. What kind of trouble is his penis going to get him into this time?

Another anime superhero movie came out in 2025, the newest Demon Slayer movie. I'm not recognizing that thing because it was just several hours of extravagant action and obvious melodrama backstory. Chainsaw Man could just be wacky powers depicted in gorgeous animation. Nobody in these parts are too good for preposterous, yet masterfully-animated fight scenes. However there's always something elevating this Man from mere pulp. In the opening scenes of this movie, Denji and Makima go on a date to see twelve hours-worth of movies (the ideal date, in fact). They find nothing interesting in the mainstream comedies or blockbuster movies the audience around them loves. They're numb to everything until at the end of the night they watch a 1959 Soviet movie set during World War II, Ballad of a Soldier, and suddenly are overcome with emotion in ways they cannot explain--

... 

--Actually you know what? We're taking a field trip. Everybody, get up, out of the Chainsaw Man review, it's field trip time!

Ballad of a Soldier, dir. Grigory Chukhray

If you really love movies you should let cinema lead you places, especially under-explored places. I recently discovered that there is a ton of classic Soviet cinema from the studio Mosfilm that is available for free on Youtube, including masterpieces from Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Freakin' Stalker is right there! You have no excuse to have not seen that one yet. That includes 1959's Ballad of a Soldier, found right here. 

Here I'll give you 90 minutes to watch it.

Okay? You caught up? Cool.

Fantastic wasn't? Black and white cinema is special. I was crying too at the end, just like the cartoon characters were. There's tons of WWII cinema out there, most of what you'll find easily is about American or Brits, and nearly all of it is set on the front lines, where the action is. This is in fact, my first ever war film I've seen made about Russia by Russians. Notably only the first few minutes of Ballad of a Soldier takes place in combat, the rest is deep within 'friendly' territory, in the endless movement back and forth that also is war. Our hero just wants to fix his mom's roof and is overcome by the confusion of the German invasion and bombings and torn-apart families on his Odyssey home. The narrator tells us from the start that private Alyosha (Vladimir Ivashov) is not surviving this war. And that makes the mere two minutes of interactions he gets to have with his mother (Antonina Maksimova) so heartbreaking. They don't know it, but probably suspect heavily, that this is going to be the last time either of them will meet. On his journey, Alyosha experiences the full breath of relations: a ruined marriage, a rekindled marriage, his own first grasp at love, and finally, the brief stare down with his mother. And still, all that humanity is mere fodder. Whatever promises you make, whatever future there might have been, the front needs bodies, and Alyosha is going to be one of them.

You can think of WWII as this great drama of superman fighting for control of continents, and then there's the reality of what it really was: pure barbarism, vandalism, theft on a scale that is beyond comprehending, theft of an entire generation's worth of futures.

Cool, good field trip, huh?

... 

--Yeah, anyway the main topic movie is a relatively silly thing about a guy with chainsaw powers riding a guy with shark powers to fight another superbeing with bomb powers. However, let us not discount teh real loneliness at the heart of Chainsaw Man (which is presumably right next to adorable chainsaw puppy). Denji is a bit of a chucklefuck, who seems actively incurious about his situation, yet still even the smallest moments of humanity end in surreal horror.

I'm starting to wonder if our field trip was more than a little indulgence of mine, maybe I was onto something there. Tatsuki Fujimoto, the author of this manga (and the manga behind 2024's even better movie, Look Back) fills the work with references from everything to Leon: The Professional to Alien, the usual cool genre stuff. But why would this slow sad Soviet movie be at the centerpiece of whatever is happening with Denji? Because he - and even Makima - are trapped just as much as Alyosha, in a kind of war, be it one considerably more high concept. There is the promise of escape, little morsels of touch and pleasure represented by Makima and later the titular Reze (Reina Ueda). But in the end, it all goes back to Chainsaw Man doing what a chainsaw does: cutting things.

Chainsaw Man: The Movie is maybe the best action film of 2025, though that action is full of pain and vast carnage. This is shonen action that relishes in its implications, a big fight scene is also like a natural disaster going off in the middle of a city. Denji has a callus of happy-go-lucky Shonen Jump stupidity to protect him, but this is as much a mask as the pure sadist evil of his opponent. The best parts of this movie are not even the spectacle. It's the opening act of Denji and Reze discovering each other, in an effective romance. even actively being erotic which is bold for a shonen space. There's the excitement of two young people exploring each other, each other's bodies. The said exploration of bodies has a cruel irony when their very biology as Demon People is what is causing all this mayhem. I was making a joke earlier when I talked about "Denji's penis getting him into trouble", but Chainsaw Man is taking that very seriously. When you're Denji, you do not get to have universal coming of age experiences without a lot of screaming and without streets overflowing with blood.

I don't know where this Chainsaw Man franchise is going, I have not read the comics beyond what has been animated. But do not be surprised when another Chainsaw Man theatrical experience makes its way onto a future list. 

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 14 - Kiss of the Spider Woman

  

14. Kiss of the Spider Woman, dir. Bill Condon

I guess I'm alone on this one?

Some of these movies are going to appear on nearly every Best of 2025 list. Do not be surprised when I cover Sinners, one of the most popular movies of the year. Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is going to make this list too. That one will likely win Best Foreign Language Picture and might be nominated for Best Picture, the juxtaposition of Brazilian fascist oppression and Hollywood blockbusters being an irresistible concoction for the Academy voters. But a very similar movie is not on a lot of Top 10 Lists. Kiss of the Spider Woman, a queer romance set in an Argentinian prison and a love letter to the golden age of musicals, will not win many awards. It got mixed reviews and nobody saw it. This movie made two million dollars against a budget of $30 million, because Lionsgate wrote it off as a failure. The only reason I knew Spider Woman existed at all was thanks to randomly checking the AMC App, which has become my only way to know about what's actually playing in theaters.

I didn't even know it was a remake of a 1985 movie, or an adaptation of a 1992 stage musical based on a 1974 novel by Manuel Puig. I saw that title and thought "huh, they made a sequel to Madame Web, I gotta see this!"

Bill Condon has the credentials to make a glamorous musical. His CV includes Dreamgirls and Chicago. He was also the director who did the best with the aching unsatisfiable romance at the center of the Twilight movies. Spider Woman is another collaboration with frequent cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, and it might be his best work. The structure of Spider Woman is about two prisoners, Valentin (Diego Luna) and Molina (Tonatiuh) stuck together in the bowls of one of the junta's worst black holes. Their cell is cramped and dark, so minimalist that it could be a stage set. Meanwhile, the two escape into the fantasy world of Molina's recounting of one of his favorite movies, the movie-within-a-movie Kiss of the Spider Woman. This is where the film explodes into dancing and movement and the bright dazzle of technicolor celluloid. At the center of their dreams is the actress Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a Hollywood starlet who is both the heroine and villain in a dual role. Duality is all over the place here since Molina and Valentin end up playing singing roles in their imagination. Reality is dismal and small, but the big screen can be enormous and free.

I'm always a sucker for fiction playing with its multiple levels of reality. Molina, who is a trans in a time when such things are not recognized properly, casts themselves in the movie as Luna's gay sidekick, magically replacing the mediocre actor in the original text. From there you can be increasingly unsure how much of what we're seeing is the "true" Spider Woman and how much is Molina's invention to help along Valentin in his struggles. Diego Luna is playing another Cassian Andor, a butch Marxist hero, who resents Hollywood musicals as unimportant capitalist nonsense. But eventually he's drawn into the glamor of it all. Luna/Valentin is cast as J-Lo's handsome leading man lover. We therefore have a queer romance that develops within the veneer of a Hollywood romance. They use the play of a straight male-female Hollywood movie to slide past the cultural taboo that separates them. It's a great dynamic.

It is an enormous shame that this version of Kiss of the Spider Woman is certainly doomed to be forgotten. I can only hope that Tonatiuh does not end up forgotten with it, I want to see more movies with them in it. Lopez and Luna are not quite perfect for Old Hollywood glamor, they're never quite comfortable doing this, but Tonatiuh belongs in celluloid.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 15 - Predator: Badlands

15. Predator: Badlands, dir. Dan Trachtenberg

That shaved sides haircut is so hot now that even Predators go for it, huh?

The Predator franchise was a miserable embarrassment just five years ago. Until Dan Trachtenberg, this was a franchise consisted of one classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, one direct sequel that I think I'm alone in enjoying, and a lot of sequels that are better off forgotten. It took over thirty years to figure out what to do with the Predator as a movie monster again. 2022's Prey was both the first time these movies had anything interesting to say since the Eighties, and also a tight exciting thriller about a young woman proving herself to be a better predator (lower case) than the Predator (proper noun).

Predator: Badlands is structurally the same movie as Prey, just starring an actual alien this time. It is amazing that there have been seven of these movies and nobody thought to have a Predator be like... an actual character for my entire lifetime. The new lead even has a respectful rivalry with a sibling as our previous Comanche heroine. Both characters wind up in the wilds of either the Great Plains or a comic book barbarian planet, and have to use nature's tools of tricks to face off against White human colonizers. I'm more than fine with repeating a plot structure if it works, and Prey worked. Let's just do it again but bigger, louder, and more Heavy Metal-ish. Sequels can be good! We got three Knives Out movies using who-done-it mysteries as cultural criticism and that franchise peaked in 2025.

The big difference is that Prey is a solo affair, the movie's lead had only a dog to hunt with her, but Badlands is a movie about a building an RPG party. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a scrawny little Predator (or "Yuatja" to use the franchise name for the species) who has to prove himself to his warrior race family, and chooses to go to the most awful planet full of the most dangerous creatures in order to earn his place. Very quickly Dek is overwhelmed by the local flora and fauna who are level 99 enemies, even his fancy Yuatja tool-kit is insufficient for this world. The only way to survive is by teaming up with a half-ruined Weyland-Yutani android, Thia (Elle Fanning) and an adorable little monkey guy, Bud (Rohinal Ravinesh Narayan). Yuatja are not terribly friendly as a species, as seen with their usual propensity to murder action stars in the jungle, so it takes awhile for Dek to open up and team up with this new crew. There's not a lot of depth to him, this is basically a movie starring a hulking slasher villain, but Elle Fanning and the CG Pokemon fill in the gaps well.

Sure, we have lost a lot of the cultural commentary by removing the Comanche historical element. I won't kid you by saying that Predator: Badlands is as interesting a movie as Prey - it isn't. Badlands is not necessarily a dumb movie, it is as clever a script as Prey, especially towards the end when Dek has to rebuild his Predator arsenal by using the various killer fauna of this death world as video game items. Call it Chekhov's space gizmos. There's a second Elle Fanning-bot who is one of the best villains of 2025. I have not seen Elle Fanning in anything for a minute, last year proved she is a fantastic actress, and she completely nails both of her robot roles. Getting to watch a Predator work as the scrappy underdog is quite the role reversal. Dek pulls off quite the Metal Gear Solid adventure with his friends in the third act. 

You could do a lot worse with a popcorn flick franchise sequel in 2025. And what Best Of list is complete without a crowd-pleaser?