Posts
Given how awful 2025 was from a pro-decency, democracy, and intellect perspective, it’s all the more ironic that it was such a good year for movies. Indeed, while my Best Of movie lists in the 2020s have been sporadic, this year I felt even extra compelled to make one, and though I easily could have slotted in 10, well, my heart told me to stick with 5. Because to my way of thinking, this Top 5, reader, is as good as the movies get.
(Click on the title to read my review.)
Top 5 Movies of 2025
5. Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s would-be impossible mashup of “From Dusk Til Dawn” and “Lightning in a Bottle” might be too long and not entirely hang together but is such a feat of sheer moviemaking that I could not care less.
4. The Baltimorons. In returning to the director’s chair for the first time in 13 years, Jay Duplass takes the famed improv comedy mantra of “Yes, and” and then hilariously, wrenchingly lives it for an hour and forty minutes.
3. The Secret Agent. It is remarkable just how much Kleber Mendonça Filho X-ray of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship of the previous century is also such an absolute blast to watch, evincing living one’s life as the ultimate act of resistance.
2. The Mastermind. Is “The Mastermind” Kelly Reichardt’s masterpiece? Eh, sorry. Got a little too excited there, but still. I think of it that way because “The Mastermind” doesn’t break new ground for her, necessarily, but also is nothing like a retread, more a drawing together of all her previous themes and expressed with full confidence and control that renders something equally poignant and pitiful, funny and sad. The first Reichardt movie that feels like a magic trick.
1. One Battle After Another. If a movie’s meaning is conveyed as much through aesthetic as narrative, as the late film theorist David Bordwell persuasively argued, then “One Battle After Another” is a full-bore triumph in which costume design, production design, music, acting, sound, and editing all say as much as the screenplay. In her acceptance speech after winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes for her performance in “One Battle After Another,” Teyana Taylor said, “Love is an action, not a word.” She was talking about how she seeks to live her own life, but she may as well have been talking about the movie itself. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant collision of genres, ideas, and tones is about a lot more than love, but everything it is about is expressed innately through its action, a high-wire headlong rush of cinema that starts and then just goes, and never stops going, and is, in fact, still going as it ends.
