What constitutes a "2025" movie for the purposes of this list is a bit subjective. Most played theatrically, some went straight to streaming. At least two might be categorized as a documentary miniseries, but I consider them films (and one was a highlight of the 2025 New York Film Festival). A few will have a theatrical release in 2026, others might continue to float around the festival circuit. Two films on my list started screening at festivals in 2023, but didn’t open commercially in the U.S. until this past Spring. Who knows? These are all films I saw for the first time this year.
This year’s list includes quite a few films from directors whose work I’ve been following since the 1990s: Hal Hartley, Atom Egoyan, Jim Jarmusch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Steven Soderbergh, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater. But I think over a dozen were the first films I’ve seen by their respective directors, which is always encouraging.
Time and access always prevent me from giving everything I enjoyed a second watch, and I usually only know if I really like something during a rewatch. I could have easily included The Secret Agent, It Was Just An Accident, Ramona At Midlife, Cover-Up, The Ballad Of Wallis Island, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, Nouvelle Vague, Sirāt, Rose Of Nevada, Black Bag, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Weapons, Heart Eyes, Messy, Splitsville, Caught Stealing, The Mastermind, Predators, Tendaberry, Grand Theft Hamlet, Bogonia, Twinless, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, The Perfect Neighbor or Love. This year was hard to narrow down to 40.
Great films that technically came out this year that I’m leaving off because they made my 2024 list: Cruel, Usual, Necessary: The Passion of Silvio Narizzano, The Dead Thing, Eephus, My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air In Moscow, The Shrouds and Vulcanizadora.
I wasn’t able to catch up with Homebound, By Design, Obex, If Love Should Die?, Somewhere Out There, Marshmallow, 28 Years Later, Souleymane’s Story, Dead Lover, Obsession, Black Rabbit White Rabbit, The Rivals of Amziah King, All I Had Was Nothingness, Drifting Laurent, When Is Fall Coming, 7 Walks with Mark Brown, Late Shift, Secret Mall Apartment, One to One: John & Yoko, Filmlovers!, L’Aventura, Ari, Death Will Come, I Only Rest in the Storm, Rental Family, Yes, On Falling, Without Arrows, Remake, Silent Friend, Afternoons Of Solitude, Cloud, The Virgin of Quarry Lake, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, Dry Leaf, Two Pianos, All That’s Left of You, Cactus Pears, My Father’s Shadow, Kontinental ‘25, The Testament of Ann Lee, Blue Heron, A Useful Ghost, Luna Rosa, Honey Bunch, Burning, The Librarians, Videoheaven, Warfare, Anniversary, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, The Piano Accident, The Scout, Seeds, Henry Fonda For President, Foul Evil Deeds, Direct Action, Grand Tour, Familiar Touch, The Accident, The Balconettes, Goodbye June, The Ballad Of Suzanne Cesaire, Blue Sun Palace, Desert of Namibia The Fishing Place, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass or Happyend, among many, many others. I’m sure my list would include some of these if I had. I especially regret not finding 5 hours to properly watch Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds.
As far as keeping titles straight, I did my best not to confuse To A Land Unknown and Where To Land, Die My Love and If Love Should Die?, Köln 75 and Kontinental ‘25, Honey Don’t and Honey Bunch. There were two new installments in the Predator franchise this year, but David Osit’s Predators wasn’t one of them. I wonder if the existence of two very different sets of films called “The Oslo Trilogy” will confuse anyone, or if we’ll ever get Grand Theft Hamnet.
This was another strong year for film-related books, given that we now have Scene (Abel Ferrara), I Loved Movies, But… (Joseph McBride and Danny Peary), Ed Wood (Will Sloan), Cinema Her Way (Marya E. Gates), Truth And Soul: A Robert Downey Reader (edited by Kier-La Janisse and Clint Enns), Adventures In Auteurism (Daniel Kremer), Creatures Of The Screen (John Harrison), Sick And Dirty (Michael Koresky), Succubus (Tim Lucas), The Greatest Gangster Movie You’ve Never Seen (Danny Stewart), Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde - Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (J. Hoberman), A Reluctant Film Critic (Gerald Peary), Insomnia (Robbie Robertson), The Making of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Jay Glennie) and newly updated editions of Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In (Joe Bob Briggs) and Behind The Pink Curtain (Jasper Sharp), not to mention a few music-centered books that may still be of interest to cinephiles, like Alan Jones’ Discomania, Jimmy McDonough’s Gary Stewart - I Am From The Honky Tonks and The Uncool by Cameron Crowe.
I'm not going to write up a list of the best physical media releases, I'm still trying to find time to go through all of the discs of new-to-me movies from companies like Mondo Macabro, Canadian International Pictures, Severin, American Genre Film Archive, Radiance, Kino Lorber, Criterion, Umbrella, Imprint, Indicator, Vinegar Syndrome, etc. but I'll just say that any year that includes the Blu-Ray (let alone 4K) debuts of (off the top of my head): Une Femme Douce, Choose Me, The Fireworks Woman, The Movie Orgy, Night Of The Juggler, Nomad, Behind The Green Door, Rampage, Born In Flames, Breaking Glass, The House With Laughing Windows, Girls Town, In My Skin, Motorpsycho, Shoeshine, Who Wants To Kill Jessie?, Mixed Blood, The Strange Affair, Wild Style, New Rose Hotel, Northern Lights, A Bell From Hell, Smoke, The Vampires Night Orgy, Racing With The Moon and Goodbye, Columbus, is a pretty exciting one.
We lose noteworthy artists every year, of course, but I can’t remember another year where I was more conscious of just how many directors, producers and actors whose work in film had impacted me were slipping away: David Lynch, Sam Sherman, Joel DeMott, Jonathan Kaplan, Henry Jaglom, Ted Kotcheff, Amos Poe, James Foley, Bertrand Blier, Rob Reiner, Robert Redford, Samantha Eggar, Gene Hackman, Sally Kirkland, Udo Kier, Diane Keaton, Olivia Hussey, Richard Chamberlain, Joe Don Baker, Terrence Stamp, Jeannot Szwarc, Peter Greene, George Armitage, Émilie Dequenne, Wings Hauser, Mark Peploe, Val Kilmer, Lar Park Lincoln, Michael Roemer, Michael Madsen, Scott Spiegel, Claudia Cardinale, Diane Ladd, Peter Watkins. Robert Benton and Stanley Jaffe, among others. That’s not even including film cultural people like critic David Ehrenstein, archivist/historian Bob Burns and Toby Talbot, the co-founder of New Yorker Films. The year's music world losses, people like Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, Terry Reid, D’Angelo, Marianne Faithfull, Jimmy Cliff, David Johansen, Steve Cropper, Roberta Flack, Ace Frehley and Ozzy Osbourne, were no less resonant, and many of them were important to films too, whether in documentaries like Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, Glastonbury Fayre, Roberta, Personality Crisis: One Night Only or this year's Sly Lives!, or even starring in their own musicals like The Harder They Come and, yes, Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park.
Alice-Heart (written and directed by Mike Macera)
April (written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili)
The Baltimorons (written by Jay Duplass and Michael Strasser, directed by Jay Duplass)
Blue Moon (written by Robert Kaplow, directed by Richard Linklater)
Bob Trevino Likes It (written and directed by Tracie Laymon)
Butthole Surfers: The Whole Truth...and Nothing Butt (written by Tom Stern and Simon Weinstein, directed by Tom Stern)
Camp (written and directed by Avalon Fast)
Caught By The Tides (written by Jiahuan Wan and Jia Zhang-ke, directed by Jia Zhang-ke)
Eddington (written and directed by Ari Aster)
Ex-Husbands (written and directed by Noah Pritzker)
Father Mother Sister Brother (written and directed by Jim Jarmusch)
Fucktoys (written and directed by Annapurna Sriram)
Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos (directed by Rex Miller)
The Ice Tower (written by Geoff Cox and Lucile Hadžihalilović, directed by Lucile Hadžihalilović)
It Ends (written and directed by Alex Ullom)
Julie Keeps Quiet (written by Ruth Becquart and Leonardo Van Dijl, directed by Leonardo Van Dijl)
Lurker (written and directed by Alex Russell)
Marty Supreme (written by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie, directed by Josh Safdie)
Miroirs No. 3 (written and directed by Christian Petzold)
Mr. Scorsese (directed by Rebecca Miller)
My Mom Jayne (directed by Mariska Hargitay)
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (written and directed by Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson)
No Other Choice (written by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Jahye Lee and Don McKellar, directed by Park Chan-wook)
Oh, Hi (written and directed by Sophie Brooks)
One Battle After Another (written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)
Pee Wee As Himself (directed by Matt Wolf)
Peter Hujar's Day (written and directed by Ira Sachs)
The Phoenician Scheme (written by Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson, directed by Wes Anderson)
Pillion (written and directed by Harry Lighton)
Presence (written by David Koepp, directed by Steven Soderbergh)
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (written and directed by Sepideh Farsi)
Seven Veils (written and directed by Atom Egoyan)
Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (directed by Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson)
Sorry, Baby (written and directed by Eva Victor)
Sound Of Falling (written by Louise Peter and Mascha Schilinski, directed by Mascha Schilinski)
Super Happy Forever (written by Kochi Kubodera and Kohei Igarashi, directed by Kohei Igarashi)
Suspended Time (written and directed by Olivier Assayas)
To A Land Unknown (written by Mahdi Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan, directed by Mahdi Fleifel)
Where To Land (written and directed by Hal Hartley)
Young Mothers (written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
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