Once again another year has passed and 20XX has become 20XY. So we're doing this again! The Top 15 Movies of twenty... something something! I saw about 70 newly-released movies last year, as I do most years. There's at least forty movies that could make this list any given year to talk about, and I still haven't seen a ton of stuff on people's Best Lists. Sorry, Sorry, Baby, I was just not interested.
First an intro, then tomorrow we'll get into No. 15.
Argument:
Last year sucked. Let us start there.
Some years earn special meme status for being awful. 2020 was so bad that we had several movies in 2025 to remember how terrible it was, most notably Ari Aster's Eddington. I do not know if 2025 will also gain such status as a numerical shorthand for bad memories. This was a year where it felt like at any moment we might tank our economy, go to war, or fully toss our constitutional rights for good. But to be positive, none of those things quite happened in 2025 - it was almost irritating. Sure, we might bomb the Hell out of innocent people and put up tariffs, yet still the year had this energy of "that sucked... so I guess we still gotta go to fucking work, huh?" The great final battle of Good vs Evil can play out in your fantasies every day and then, yup, tomorrow you're getting up and taking a shit and getting in the car to do it again.
This is horrible, but it could be worse. If you need an obvious blunt metaphor, only part of the White House was bulldozed, and I'm ambivalent about the rest of that structure at this point.
However, you could talk the same way about 2024, or to a certain extent about 2023, or 2019, or 2016, or 2015, or 2004. I have been dooming about more or less exactly this second act of the Trump Era since two elections ago, and there's paper trail on this very website to prove it. Really nothing about last year was special: not cosmically, not in terms of the general standards of humanity. And also, you might not have noticed this, but movies were really good last year. It was a great year in the theaters that it felt like there were three movies playing at all times I needed to see. I might never catch up on the things I missed. However, no matter how many times you saw One Battle After Another, it didn't fix anything. 2025 still was one battle after another, and like 2024, 2023, etc, nothing was settled.
No, 2025 was simply one of the worst years of my life, and that was not the president's fault, or Elon Musk's fault, or the shitheal kicker for the Kansas City Chief's fault. This post going to get really sad really fast, just a warning. Maybe the world edged itself all year for the worst to happen and it didn't. That's the world. The worst actually did happen to me. There's no relief to be found in the other shoe dropping.
2025 was the year my Grandma died. She was more than just a Grandma to me, she was my third parent, and that made 2025 a uniquely horrible year no matter what was in theaters or what the state of the world might be. I had a bad winter since she was in the hospital a lot. I had a bad spring because she passed away. I had a bad summer because I was in mourning. I had really awful holidays because Grandma was the holidays growing up: she did the decorating and the cooking and she was Santa Claus. she hid the toys and sang the songs and made us leave an apple for Rudolph to eat.
This all matters for this list because I love movies because of my Grandma.
I have not written anything on this blog in awhile because I knew I would have to write what is effectively a second obituary here. I already wrote a good one for my friends and family back in June. This is a different kind of thing: odds are you didn't know her, and you were worse off for it. She was the kind of sweet old lady that took on the nickname "Duck". She loved children, never suffered fools (certainly not presidential fools), and wanted to care for everybody. She was there for us during the Last Worst Year of My Life(™), 2010, when my baby cousin passed away. That's the worst thing that could ever happen to a Grandma Duck, and she survived it because we needed her. You never heard her still talking to her Grandson when she dropped a pan, sure that his ghost was playing tricks on her. You never had her French Toast on a Saturday morning while watching Seventies Godzilla movies in the living room. You never heard her snore in the middle of Longlegs, wake up, and groggily insist she wasn't actually asleep. You never had the uncomfortable experience of listening to her comment how a certain actress in a shitty SciFi Channel Creature Feature about Giant Snakes has "an amazing body" when you've seen that very same actress naked in a Skinamax movie the night before. I do not know how many weekends I've spent just watching movies with Grandma, how many thousands of things she took me and my sister and my cousins to, how many movies on this blog that I've reviewed that I saw with her.
Take a random post from over ten years ago... Uhh... the World War Z review. Not my best work as a writer, obviously. I took Grandma to the theaters to see that one, because she liked Brad Pitt and liked dumb monster movies. She enjoyed that movie. I didn't. Doesn't really matter now, even watching a bad movie with her was a good time because at least we had something to complain about. The zombies looked dumb and it is fun to dislike stuff sometimes with people you love.
Just how many VHS's did we rent from the video store around the corner? How many DVDs were in boxes around our the house? We bought her a Gerard Butler pillow so she could cuddle with him all beefcaked out flexing his muscles because she loved Dracula 2000 and Olympus Has Fallen and similar kinds of junk. She was never a snob like me, never felt the need to write about anything, she just wanted to watch stuff with everybody. She had the purest kind of film-going experience.
This is the culture really I come from as a critic: the Manger set under the Christmas tree this year had a giant killer shark watching over Baby Jesus in lieu of the angel. My family made a point to all go see Jaws on its fiftieth anniversary. I wish Grandma had been there. I am not making a statement about films as an act of politics, our relationship with capitalism, or what the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros means for the state of the artform. I just wish I heard Grandma doze off in the middle of Jaws and snore. There's a terrible-looking movie coming out this week about a killer monkey attacking teenagers that I would love to tell Grandma about. I laugh at that trailer every single time I see it, she would love that pile of bullshit.
Death is going to be a recurring feature on this list.A lot of the movies in the Top 15 are about mourning, or about dying, or about letting go. That was not necessarily by design. Mortality is universal, so it is going to come up a lot regardless of the year. But death seemed to be extremely on certain filmmakers' minds, and it was definitely on mine in 2025.
We're going to start with something fun and dumb and something I'm sure Grandma would have loved. It has a little monkey guy in it. Sad stuff will be back though.
Top 15:
15.
