The Best Movies of 2025
In which Norm finds an unexpected through-line in the cinema of 2025. Also there's some dancing.
Well, this was a year, huh? We seem to be speedrunning the end of the world, or at least the end of Life As We Know It, and all of the usual cautions and controls just aren't there anymore. And I know, I know, the world is always ending, but this cycle feels even less hopeful than usual. Can you blame me for self-soothing with art?
What strikes me as odd about the cinema of 2025 is that I found myself responding so strongly to movies about parents, despite not having children myself. Maybe it’s the ambivalence with which some of them approached the ideas of love and responsibility, and what we owe to the next generation, or maybe it’s the acknowledgement that none of us knows what the fuck we’re doing, and the choices we make in the moment don’t always lead to the outcomes we expect. I’m as surprised as you are, really.
Anyway, here’s my list of the ten best movies I saw this year, ranked in alphabetical order because I hate making lists.
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
The latest from Scots filmmaker Ramsay is a film of phenomenal power, a study of passion, depression and conflicted motherhood featuring one of Jennifer Lawrence’s strongest and wildest performances as a new mother collapsing into herself while her husband (Robert Pattinson) is off doing whatever husbands do. She’s not exactly isolated, but she feels like she is, and as time stretches on her state of mind fractures even further. But she doesn’t grow numb, and neither does the movie: Die My Love is an onslaught of feeling, a study of unhappy domesticity played out as an immersive, unrelenting nightmare, anchored in Lawrence’s ferocity. It’s audacious and brutal and eerie and haunting, the missing link between Morvern Callar and Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Die My Love is now available to stream on Mubi; a physical release will hopefully follow in 2026.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
Bronstein’s white-knuckle psychodrama stars Rose Byrne in the performance of the year as Linda, an overstressed mother who’s worn herself to a nub attempting to treat her young daughter’s unspecified eating disorder while her naval-officer husband is off at sea, and sneaks out every night to self-medicate with wine and pot. Bronstein turns up the dial on both the character’s anxiety and the audience’s, cleverly keeping Linda’s never-named daughter as an abstract challenge just outside the frame – but always whining and screaming, her own issues amplified by Linda’s agitation. And Byrne gives Linda a manic energy and mounting desperation that make it easy to empathize with the character as she races towards a catharsis she so desperately needs.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is now available on Blu-ray in Canada from VVS Films. A24 will probably release its own edition in the new year.
The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan)
Mike Flanagan’s exquisite screen adaptation of Stephen King’s novella is the best adaptation of King’s work in decades, with a wonderful cast – including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill, Mia Sara and narrator Nick Offerman – embodying the author’s message that the only way to cope with the uncertainty and terror of one’s life is to live it fully and fearlessly. It’s whimsical without being cloying, somber without being pretentious. It’s about the opportunities the world offers and the things we choose to value – which aren’t always the same – and how nice it is to have someone to dance with. It’s probably Flanagan’s masterpiece, but he’s young yet and you never know.
The Life of Chuck is now available in 4K and Blu-ray editions from Decal Releasing.
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Any new film from Anderson is going to be an Event, and his decision to shoot this one in VistaVision – the large-format process Brady Corbet resurrected for The Brutalist last year, and which looks absolutely stunning when blown up in 70mm prints – makes it a double statement. Anderson is doing as much for the theatrical experience as Christopher Nolan, with the difference that he’s not satisfied with being a technical master. He also needs us to care, and with One Battle After Another – an extremely loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, about a fugitive activist and his teenage daughter pursued by an unhinged federal agent – he grounds Pynchon’s arch satire about the death of the revolutionary ’60s spirit in the desperation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s hapless dad trying to keep his daughter safe, even though said daughter (Chase Infiniti) turns out to be a lot more resourceful than he is. He brought her up right, even if she didn’t know it.
One Battle After Another is still in theaters, available to stream on HBO Max and Crave in Canada, and due on 4K and Blu-ray January 20th, 2026, with a special edition coming in the spring.
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Mendonça Filho’s sprawling, novelistic masterwork opens with an undeniably powerful metaphor, as a man (Wagner Moura) stops for gas at a station where a corpse has been left to rot in the sun. This is Brazil in 1977, a land of “mischief,” according to the opening titles. That’s ironic, of course: Moura’s character has gone into hiding to avoid the wrath of someone powerful and angry, and he’s returned to his hometown of Recife to pick up his young son Fernando before fleeing the country. But the passports aren’t ready, and assassins are closing in. Mendonça Filho has made a movie about how we’re all of us waiting for the future to arrive, knowing the bad times won’t last and hoping we live to see better days. At least we can try to make things better for those who make it there. Imagine that statement seeming controversial.
The Secret Agent is now playing in the US and Canada.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
There’s an energy, a thrill, to Sinners that leaps off the screen. It’s the work of an artist who can’t wait to show you the next image, the next effect, the next idea. The movie can barely contain them, to the point that the narrative can get a little muddy here and there, but it never loses track of what really matters. Ryan Coogler’s period horror movie – confident, powerful, unapologetically political – is a feat of magnificent, seat-of-the-pants storytelling, using the fabric of genre to tell a story about racialized and marginalized people making a stand against a colonizing force that wants their bodies, their art and ultimately their souls. Michael B. Jordan’s dual performance is a blast, but don’t discount the work of Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld and Jack O’Connell; everybody’s doing exactly what they need to do to carry this thing, and the resulting ride was like nothing else I saw this year. (Well, almost nothing.)
Sinners is available in 4K and Blu-ray from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.
Sirāt (Olivier Laxe)
If not for Sinners, Laxe’s pulverizing apocalyptic road movie would be the cinematic event of the year … but it’s still awfully close. Sergi López – the villain of Pan’s Labyrinth, grown stouter and more haggard in middle age – plays Luis, a father looking for his missing daughter on the North African desert-rave circuit, accompanied by his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez). The pair are eventually befriended by a few older ravers, played by nonactors Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Janvier and Jade Oukid. Gradually, it becomes clear that the world beyond the rave scene is not what it ought to be, and that this search may be all Luis has. Over the course of two hours, Sirāt shifts from a simple, straightforward drama to something else, a hallucinatory, excruciatingly tense survival story that takes the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot, William Friedkin and George Miller and pushes it into a daring new gear. Please see this movie at the biggest, loudest venue available to you.
Sirāt is in limited release in the US and opening in Canada in the new year.
Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)
The first film from writer-director Victor – who also stars as Agnes, a grad student at a small college dealing with a traumatic event – is as ferocious as Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, though it expresses its rage in a minor key. Employing a scrambled chronology that might suggest Agnes skipping through her own memories, trying to make sense of something she’s blocked out, Victor leavens the story’s growing tension with moments of unexpected comedy that reveal something essential about a character, or make us lean forward to see what might happen next. And every character is worth watching, performed by a crackling supporting cast that includes Naomi Ackie, Louis Cancelmi, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch and my actual friend Kelly McCormack.
Sorry, Baby is on Blu-ray from VVS Films in Canada! You can import it! Oh shit, tariffs though.
The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)
Starring a transcendent Amanda Seyfried as the messianic Shaker who brought the Quaker sect to America in the 18th century, Fastvold’s latest is a stunning artistic accomplishment – and after co-writing The Brutalist with her partner Brady Corbet, Fastvold gets to make her own statement about the stories Americans tell themselves about who they are and where their country came from. Seyfried’s Ann is simultaneously serene and electric, passionate and poised. She radiates truth in a world of misery and suffering, and you can understand why people gravitate to her. I suspect the film will play that way for people, its period naturalism giving way to impressionistic sequences of the Shakers in worship, their hymns turned into full-on production numbers with choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall and music by Daniel Blumberg. At first the transitions are eerie and strange; by the end of the film, they’re as natural as breathing. We’ve been welcomed into the mystery.
The Testament of Ann Lee is in limited release in the US, and going wider in the new year. It opens in Toronto on January 16th, 2026.
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania)
Ben Hania’s shattering hybrid project re-creates the events of January 29th, 2024, when emergency workers for Palestine’s Red Crescent tried to rescue a trapped Palestinian child from Israeli fire in Gaza. We experience the day from the perspective of those aid workers, played by Palestinian actors Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel and Clara Khoury – all performing to actual audio of the six-year-old Rajab’s emergency call. It’s a dramatic flourish that borders on the sadistic, and you will have trouble with it. That’s the point.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is in limited release in the US and Canada.
The Rest of the Best
As always, the year offered far more than ten great pictures. There were double-bills from two of my favorite filmmakers, with Steven Soderbergh delivering the cerebral chills of Presence and the arch spy games of Black Bag and Richard Linklater rolling out Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague, two very different studies of artists at opposite ends of their careers.
R.T. Thorne’s 40 Acres and Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later immersed us in devastated but somehow hopeful futures, and Drew Hancock’s Companion and Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 introduced us to artificial protagonists and the humans who love them, or claim to.
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice and Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare were radically different works from technical masters, though the accomplishments of the former are a lot more pleasurable than the blunt-force shock and awe of the latter.
David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds and Zach Cregger’s Weapons plunged into the unknowable darkness of loved ones leaving us, while Ira Sachs brought a long-dead artist back to life in the delicate, lovely Peter Hujar’s Day.
And James Gunn’s Superman and Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man both used the cover of genre storytelling to make their audiences contemplate questions morality, determinism, empathy and simple faith – in people, and in other stuff – while also allowing us to enjoy the elasticity of cinema. Telling the truth can be a bitter herb, as the saying goes … but you can also wrap it in popcorn.
Up next: The year’s last new releases, among them Black Phone 2, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and The Smashing Machine. And a couple of other titles finally arrived! You’ll see!