If this year proved anything, it’s that movies are still taking big, exciting swings. This list of what we think are the best movies of 2025 is all over the place in the best way: gnarly horror, sweaty anxiety dramas, maximalist auteurs, full-throttle blockbusters, and films that feel urgent, restless, and unmistakably of this moment.
It’s also pretty wild how many of these we called earlier in the year.
The main connective thread is how many of them were driven by original ideas and bold personal vision. In a landscape clogged with recycled IP, these films took risks, trusted the audience, and went for it – whether that meant reinventing genre, pushing form, or just doing something unapologetically strange. Big-budget or scrappy and chaotic, these are the movies that reminded me why I love going to the cinema in the first place.
The best movies of 2025
- No Other Choice
- If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
- 28 Years Later
- Weapons
- Avatar: Fire and Ash
- Sinners
- Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie
- Eddington
- Marty Supreme
- One Battle After Another
10. No Other Choice
Director: Park Chan-wook
One of the GOATs of Korean cinema, Park Chan-wook, follows up his underrated 2022 masterpiece Decision to Leave with a razor-sharp, satire about desperation, capitalism, and the quiet terror of being replaced.
When family man Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) is abruptly fired after 25 years at the same paper company, he concocts a plan to quite literally eliminate his competition for a new job. What follows is a darkly comic spiral of moral collapse, staged with Park Chan-wook's trademark precision and wicked sense of irony.
9. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
Director: Mary Bronstein
No film this year will leave you more anxious than Mary Bronstein's unflinching portrait of motherhood, anchored by a career-best performance from Rose Byrne.
This claustrophobic, Kaufman-esque, jet-black comedy follows therapist Linda (Byrne) and her sick young daughter as a chain of escalating events strands them in a grimy roadside motel, where every attempt at reasserting control only makes things worse. While this is undeniably Byrne's movie, co-stars A$AP Rocky and Conan O'Brien shine.
An amazing, yet uncomfortably demanding watch that will have you breathing a sigh of relief when the lights come back on.
8. 28 Years Later
Director: Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's long-gestating reunion brings them back to the world of their scrappy 2002 lo-fi zombie riff 28 Days Later with the surprisingly poignant and emotionally charged post-apocalyptic thriller 28 Years Later.
The nail-biting set pieces and clever mutations of the infected, shot with the frenetic intimacy only an iPhone can offer, absolutely deliver. But it's the film's tender, fragile ruminations on life and death that really linger, long after the gore and jump scares have faded away.
7. Weapons
Director: Zack Cregger
Zach Cregger became one of the most exciting names in horror with 2022's Barbarian, and anticipation for his follow-up was understandably sky-high.
His anthology-structured sophomore effort more than lived up to expectations, proving he's not a one-trick pony. Equal parts '80s Spielberg-suburban horror and PTA's Magnolia stylistically, Cregger's cinematic swing becomes a thrilling meditation on collective grief and the ways a community processes loss.
There are so many stand-out performances here, particularly Cary Christopher as Alex, but we think its legacy will be best remembered for its most iconic contribution to the horror canon: Aunt Gladys.
6. Avatar: Fire and Ash
Director: James Cameron
There's good reason "never bet against Big Jim" is a mantra among film buffs. No other filmmaker comes close to operating on the bonkers, balls-to-the-wall blockbuster level of James Cameron's Avatar series.
Unlike the 13-year wait between the first two films, Fire and Ash arrives hot on the heels of 2022's The Way of Water. Humans aren't the only threat facing Pandora and the Na'vi this time around.
We're introduced to the Ash Tribe and their violent leader Varang, played by a scene-stealing Oona Chaplin, who doesn't share her blue brethren's reverence for nature. Good news for fans of Payakan, the breakout Tulkun from The Way of Water: he's back.
Fire and Ash leans into the stranger, bolder corners of the Avatar universe, delivering dazzling, jaw-dropping visuals that will leave you in a trance for its three-plus-hour run time. See it on the biggest screen possible.
5. Sinners
Director: Ryan Coogler
Ryan Coogler's blood-soaked love letter to vampire cinema and Southern Gothic horror became both a box-office hit and a full-blown cultural phenomenon in 2025.
Sinners is proof that in an era of endless live-action remakes and exhausted IP recycling, an original story can still absolutely light up audiences.There's so much to love here — the inspired blues soundtrack, the dual Michael B. Jordan performances, and that completely gonzo final coda.
Here's to more bold, original storytelling actually making it to the big screen.
4. Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie
Director: Matt Johnson
A continuation of the beloved cult series, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol's film follows fictional versions of themselves; two delusional best friends plotting a string of increasingly unhinged publicity stunts to land a gig at Toronto's iconic Rivoli, despite lacking anything that even resembles an actual song.
And just as the series bent copyright law to spoof beloved properties, the movie lifts an equally liberal page from the 1985 classic Back To The Future, becoming a time-travel story that lets the duo collide with their younger selves through archival footage and some of the most audacious, "how did they even do that?" trickery of the decade.
3. Eddington
Director: Ari Aster
Ari Aster's satirical neo-western didn't just split audiences — it straight up cleaved them. Some found his decision to poke fun at pandemic-era trauma to be flat-out "too soon," while others saw it as the most brutally accurate portrait yet of the collective meltdown we all lived through; doomscrolling a collapsing world from the glow of our phones.
Jagged, mean, weirdly hilarious, and impossible to shake, Eddington delivered the year's most feral arguments — and the clearest, ugliest mirror of how we actually behaved.
2. Marty Supreme
Director: Josh Safdie
Don't let the ping-pong table fool you: Marty Supreme is not a sports movie in the classic sense. This high-octane, pressure-cooker riff on the pursuit of the American Dream sits far closer to the Safdies' Good Time and Uncut Gems than Forrest Gump.
Marty Supreme features a truly career-defining performance from Timothée Chalamet, whose spindly, motor-mouthed, self-assured ping-pong prodigy slash grifter Marty Mauser feels like he exists somewhere between Tom Cruise in Risky Business and George Costanza.
The pacing is classic Safdie, making you feel like one of Marty's neon-orange ping-pong balls ricocheting from one burst of chaos to the next increasingly terrible decision.
The stacked supporting cast all deliver stellar work, especially I Love LA's Odessa A'Zion as Rachel, the Bonnie to Marty's Clyde, but make no mistake: this is a career-defining best from Timmy.
1. One Battle After Another
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
No cinematic experience this year had us collectively shouting "we're so back" louder than Paul Thomas Anderson's biggest, boldest, and most sprawlingly action-packed film yet.
A loose riff on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Anderson drags Reagan-era paranoia into a messy, modern America and somehow makes it feel both mythic and uncomfortably now. It's also one of his funniest films, with bone-dry absurdism running through every scene Leo DiCaprio spends radiating premium loser-dad energy.
The headline trio of DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn, along with the rest of the ensemble, goes off like Bob Ferguson's French 75 fireworks display. And in the middle of it all, newcomer Chase Infiniti delivers an instant star-making performance: the kind of "remember where you were" arrival that roles rarely offer anymore.
For all its scale and madness (amped even higher by Jonny Greenwood's twitchy, staccato score), the film ultimately narrows into a deceptively simple story about generational trauma and the ghosts of revolution that refuse to stay buried. A movie made for right now, and maybe the one we needed most.