top of page
Search

THE BEST MOVIES OF 2025

Updated: 6 days ago

It’s my favorite time of year. It really is. It’s time to talk about the best and worst movies of 2025, and every year (for as long as I’ve been doing this, which is now 40 years) film critics like myself have to dig into our hearts and our guts and our brains and figure out which movies we loved the most.


Forty years. I can’t believe it. March of 2025 marked my official 40th anniversary as a professional film critic. And yes (shameless plug here) to honor that milestone, I put out a book called 40 Years, 40 Films, which is a cinematic journey through those decades of screenings and reviews and radio shows and festival headaches and the whole rollercoaster.


It's the holiday season. You should absolutely buy a couple copies from Eckhartz Press. Seriously. Buy the book. Support an old man. Thank you.


Now, as I said a couple of days ago, when we published my list of the 20 worst movies of 2025, this wasn’t exactly a banner year for cinema. There were some terrific films, there were a handful of great ones, but there were also stretches (long stretches) of months where there was nothing but mediocrity.


Weekends where literally nothing good opened. Periods where the only choices in theaters were disappointments, retreads, or movies that completely baffled me because critics everywhere seemed to be losing their minds over them.


And that brings me to another point. I talked about this in the worst list, but it bears repeating: I have no idea why so many film critics, film societies, and awards groups have fallen head-over-heels in love with certain movies this year. Weapons, Sinners, Train Dreams, Hamnet, Sorry, Baby and others, are movies that are popping up on top-ten lists across the country, and I sit there thinking, “Did we even see the same film?”


And again, I’m not doing this on purpose, I’m not trying to be a contrarian, I’m not putting on a performance of being the cranky guy who hates everything critics love.


These opinions are honest. Every one of them. I watch these movies, I process them, and what comes out is the truth as I see it. And that truth is: a whole lot of the movies being celebrated in 2025 just didn’t do it for me.


But on the other side of that, the movies that I think are great, I mean genuinely great, are not the ones everyone else is talking about. Some of them barely got released. Some of them made five dollars at the box office. Some of them you’ve probably never even heard of unless you actively hunt for this stuff.


And some of them, frankly, are movies that a lot of people liked, but maybe not as much as I did. And that’s fine, because this list isn’t about what other people loved. It’s about the movies that hit me the hardest, the ones that stuck with me, the ones that made me laugh or cry or lean forward or sit back and go, “Okay, that’s cinema.”


I do want to be clear: I didn’t hate everything this year. I don’t want to be the grumpy old film critic yelling at clouds, even though, let’s be honest... I kind of am a grumpy old film critic yelling at clouds.


But there really were a bunch of wonderful movies in 2025, even if the year overall wasn’t great. And I feel obligated (seriously obligated) to mention the excellent films that didn’t quite make the cut for my top 20. These are the runners-up, the honorable mentions, the movies that I loved but that couldn’t crack the final list.



All of those are terrific movies. All of them made the sloggy, uneven patches of 2025 moviegoing bearable.


Now we get to the good stuff. The 20 best films of 2025. The movies that restored my faith, that reminded me why I go to the theater every week, that made the rough stretches worth it.


And again, some of these are unusual choices, some of these are small movies, and some of these might surprise you, but they are the 20 films that meant the most to me this year.


And my number one? No surprise there. It’s the obvious choice. It’s the movie that’s going to dominate awards season. It’s the one everyone agrees on, me included.


So here we go. Without further ado, here are the 20 Best Movies of 2025, in order of preference. Number one being the best film of the year.



THE 20 BEST MOVIES OF 2025 (in order of preference):

























Thanks for reading, and please SUBSCRIBE to my weekly NEWSLETTER!


bottom of page