Alonso Duralde’s Top 10 Films of 2025

2025 was an exasperating year in general, and films and moviegoing were certainly part of that twelve months of uncertainty. On the one hand, the threat of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros. set off another round of doom-predictions regarding the future of theatrical exhibition and of people watching movies at a multiplex rather than on their couches. On the other hand, Warner Bros. released two movies (Sinners and One Battle After Another) that actively encouraged viewers to experience them not once but multiple times on the big screen, in a variety of projection formats.

Number-crunchers will observe that ticket sales are creeping back up to pre-COVID numbers, and lovers of film — at least those lucky enough to live near venues that screen arthouse, documentary, and international titles on a regular basis — could at least appreciate that fact that there was always something to recommend throughout the entire year.

My 2025 runners-up (alphabetically): Art for Everybody; The Baltimorons; Black Bag; BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions; Blue Moon; Bugonia; Cloud; The Damned; Dracula (Radu Jude); Dust Bunny; Freaky Tales; Henry Fonda for President; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You; Kiss of the Spider Woman; Little Amélie or the Character of Rain; The Long Walk; Lurker; Merrily We Roll Along; Misericordia; Nouvelle Vague; On Becoming a Guinea Fowl; One of Them Days; Pavements; Peter Hujar’s Day; Presence; Sorry, Baby; Souleymane’s Story; Splitsville; An Unfinished Film; The Wedding Banquet

10. Happyend: Neo Sora’s tale of high-school students in a Tokyo of the near future standing up to totalitarianism on the macro- and micro- levels provided a much-needed jolt of hope in a year when fascism lurked around seemingly every corner.

9. A House of Dynamite: The unspoken layer of dread and tension in Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear thriller came in imagining members of the current regime being part of life-or-death conversations, but even without that added terror, this breathlessly suspenseful and exquisitely edited tale was a white-knuckler that offered no easy answers or palliatives regarding the global arms race.

8. Rebuilding: Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman followed 2022’s A Love Song with another low-key and heartfelt look at working-class Americans surviving and planning what to do next with their lives. Josh O’Connor (one of 2025’s hardest working and most talented screen actors) leads an extraordinary ensemble, including Meghann Fahy, Kali Reis, Lily LaTorre, and Amy Madigan. (Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, from the suspenseful Weapons, was one of the year’s standouts, launching countless memes and Halloween costumes.)

7. It Was Just an Accident: Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi continues to tells unfiltered human stories about life in Iran, even as his government constantly threatens to throw him back into prison. But Panahi’s movies aren’t just brave and daring: they’re meaningful, powerful, and insightful, like this story of a reunited group of former political prisoners who are pretty sure (but not 100%) that they’ve captured their former torturer.

6. One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson’s saga of revolutionaries up against the forces of white supremacist patriarchy — both blatant and behind-the-scenes — met 2025’s political moment while also redefining the car chase, not to mention crafting some of the year’s most indelible characters.

5. Train Dreams: They don’t put up plaques commemorating the men who cleared the forests and built the railways and otherwise created the United States as we know it, but this gorgeous, minimalist look at the life of a lumberman (a never-better Joel Edgerton) and his loves and labors gave shape and focus to an existence usually ignored by history.

4. Caught by the Tides: Chinese master filmmaker Jia Zhangke crafted a gorgeous and heartbreaking tale of the 21^st century by putting together footage of actress Zhao Tao (much of it previously unused, from previous productions) and crafting the story of a separation, culminating in a COVID-era reunion that provided one of the year’s most heartbreaking moments.

3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow: Documentarian Julia Loktev introduces us to independent Russian journalists, most of them women, during the run-up to the war in Ukraine, and we see the government go from tarring these brave reporters as “foreign agents” to forcing all of them to flee the country for their safety. This five-and-a-half-hour epic (the first in a series) was one of 2025’s most breathless thrillers, and a haunting glimpse at the price of speaking truth to power.

2. Eephus: Two local baseball teams gather at a local ballpark in the late 1990s for the very last time, since the park is about to be demolished for the construction of a school. That’s all that happens in this baseball comedy, but as with Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (which Eephus director and co-writer Carson Lund shot), it’s less about plot and more about the melancholy of a ritual that is coming to an end.

1. Sinners: Whether you saw it in IMAX, 70mm, 35mm, digital, or (as Jesse Plemons recently confessed to doing) on an airplane, there’s no denying the majesty of Ryan Coogler’s period piece about twin gangsters (both played by Michael B. Jordan) returning to Mississippi after surviving the First World War and the mean streets of Chicago. Sinners is a musical, and a horror movie, and a cultural history, and a drama about racism, and that just scratches the surface of all the ideas this glorious movie manages to wrap its arms around. Its success as a non-IP film with a cast principally composed of actors of color stood out as a moment of hope for the movies, now and in years to come.