Ranking The Best Movies of 2025 | Group Chat
The Year That Made Us Dare to Ask, "Are We Back?"
From time to time, Cinemantic’s contributors will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movies. As we enter the Year of our Lord 2026, we look back at the year that was. One with large dry spells, worrying trends, looming mergers, euphoric highs, and a sense that maybe, just maybe, movies will make it out alright.
Here are our picks for the best movies of 2025. Each contributor had ten picks.
Graham’s List:
10. The Naked Gun/Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
The two best times I had at the theater this year. The Naked Gun successfully channeled the side-splitting comedy of the original trilogy; the last hour of the Final Reckoning was some of the best adrenaline-pumping cinema of the year. These are two great tributes to passionate franchise filmmaking. Reviews here and here.
9. The Phoenician Scheme
Director Wes Anderson — one of our great auteurs — spins a convoluted but poignant tale about Benicio del Toro’s patriarch learning how to become a father through a modern-day biblical story about the relationship between a father and a daughter. As always, Anderson’s ability to direct an ensemble cast is a joy to watch.
8. Black Bag/Presence
Another two-fer from the team of Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp. Presence is a perfectly structured screenplay that tells the story of a huanted house, but from the ghost’s perspective. In a lesser writer’s hands, the movie could be dismissed as a gimmick, but Presence plays its premise patiently, waiting until the very end to reveal an emotionally devastating twist that becomes obvious in hindsight. Black Bag is a similarly taut spy thriller that doesn’t waste a second and is a tribute to Soderbergh’s ability to make a simple dinner conversation cinematic.
7. Bugonia
Bugonia doesn’t quite stick the landing in the third act, but it’s still a compelling, heartbreaking, and revolting story about male loneliness and extremism. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons shine, but Aidan Delbis turns in one of the best performances of the year as the simpleton brother. This and an entry further down on this list make a great companion piece about our present moment.
6. Weapons
Director Zach Creggers’s follow-up to 2022’s Barbarian hit all the right notes for a summer horror break-out hit, and also defied a simplistic, didactic interpretation. It’s equal parts intriguing, scary, and funny, and its cathartic finale was one of the great moments of 2025.
5. Wake Up Dead Man
Wake Up Dead Man has all of the clockwork-like, clever precision that Rian Johnson’s mystery scripts are known for. But it also one of the single best sequences of the year — Josh O’Connor’s priest talking to a woman on the phone. It’s a surprisingly moving film about faith, and it smartly eschews much of the self-satisfied smugness of the previous entry in the series.
4. Marty Supreme
An absolutely electric two-and-a-half hours at the cinema, I am very grateful I saw Marty Supreme in time to include it on this list. It’s both a story about Jewish assimilation into American life after the Holocaust, and a story about post-war America needing to mature and take responsibility for the things it creates. Timothée Chalamet should be the frontrunner for Best Actor.
3. Eddington
Eddington feels of a piece with Bugonia in that it’s a movie about our current moment, or at least about the insanity of the past five years. The first half of the film is incisive, funny, and will bring back some painful memories of the COVID pandemic. The second half gets increasingly unhinged, and truly defies explanation like no other film this year.
2. Sinners
The breakout hit of the year, Sinners produced the single best sequence of the year: the long-take through the history of African American dance and music. It’s a film that takes literally the idea of as appropriation and forced assimilation. It’s scary, smart, and refreshingly sexy, and Ryan Coogler’s directorial chops are on display at every moment.
1. 28 Years Later
A nail-bitingly tense first half gave way to a beautiful, thoughtful, and quiet second half about death, mercy, and end-of-life care. 28 Years Later is the best film of this year because it’s a gorgeous work that is highly entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis that engages with contemporary concerns about disease and isolation, and also has something timeless to say about human mortality.
Tyler’s List:
10. Black Bag
More than once this year, I watched a movie where I thought, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” Steven Soderbergh’s talky, dining room espionage thriller Black Bag is the pinnacle of that: an intimate, witty, genre flick with clockwork precision and terrific turns from Cate Blanchett and Tom Burke.
9. One Battle After Another
The heir apparent to the coveted Best Picture trophy, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious leap to big-budget fare paid off. Sprawling in scope and intimate in character, it’s The Searchers if told from the perspective of the Comanche. While I have criticisms, the bravado of the craftsmanship and performances cannot be dismissed.
8. The Naked Gun
Like my counterpart, watching Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun was the best theater going experience I had this year. It’s so funny. The audience chuckled constantly, stretching into the ending credits. And what a thrill it was to join them in that. Its the best studio comedy in a long time—and proof that there is still a market for silly, irreverent films. If only studios were brave enough to make them.
7. Wake Up Dead Man
It’s not the most entertaining Benoit Blanc mystery, but this third caper is by far the best. Ditching the silly smarminess of COVID-era hypocrisy for a moving gothic-style meditation on the mystery of faith, writer-director Rian Johnson reminds us of what he’s capable of. Daniel Craig is ever delightful, but it’s Josh O’Connor who gives this film a heart and soul you won’t soon forget.
6. F1
This is a capital-M movie. Escapism at the highest level, a high-concept original film that’s short on story but so fucking cool to experience. The ending is inevitable but the verisimilitude of the film makes you grip the seat in anticipation nonetheless. Platitudes like this shouldn’t be surprising, considering it was directed and produced by the folks who gave us Top Gun: Maverick just a few years ago.
5. Eddington
Boy, this movie goes there. Fearless in its criticisms and its shockingly violent third act, writer-director Ari Aster has made the best American western since the Coen Brother’s True Grit. A bold statement on the American psyche during 2020, this slow burn is an provocative descent into a shared madness that we can’t look away from.
4. Hamnet
Good Will Shakespeare. Returning to her naturalistic roots that made her a known quantity, Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao explores the devastating origins of the Bard’s most famous play (I’ll give you three guesses which one it is). Anchoring the whole film is a towering performance from Jesse Buckley, whose grief is all-too-real and sits with you long after the lights come up.
3. Marty Supreme
Timothee Chalamet is the defining movie star of his generation. After commanding blockbusters and indie darlings for the last decade, the triumph of his role as Marty Mauser, a charismatic, shockingly vain, and blindly confident ping pong hustler in 1950s New York is so singular, so self-evident, that it cements his place as the next DiCaprio. Thrillingly episodic, writer-director-editor Josh Safdie keeps you on the edge of seat for the entire runtime — even if the conclusion is evident from the, “Wait, is that what I think it is?” opening credit sequence.
2. 28 Years Later
Trailers historically give the whole movie away. How refreshing it was to realize that the year’s best trailer only hinted at the first act of the year’s best horror film. Wildly inventive, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the franchise that made them famous with flare to spare— imbuing the series with a sense of grace that was previously absent. Elegiac and mythical.
1. Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s gothic horror film is cinematic jolt of blockbuster adrenaline: fiery and sensual and funny and creepy and deeply entertaining. And while other films this year explore the damaged American mind, including Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another, none do so with as much originality and flare. It’s a bold declaration that film still matters, that it can still shape culture, and that it can still take our breath away. Original, phantasmagorically beautiful, and utterly singular.
Daniel’s List:
10. One of Them Days
Keke Palmer is one of our great entertainers, and I hope she gets a real breakout opportunity for even bigger successes. This was a fun buddy comedy with plenty of chemistry between Keke and SZA. Wish I’d seen it in a loud, rowdy theatre.
9. Train Dreams
A beautiful tale about the times changing and a man’s reflection on his life. Joel Edgerton gives a career-best performance as a man grappling with the loss of his wife/daughter and figuring out his place in the world. Love seeing William H. Macy even in a brief role.
8. Black Bag
I’m immediately going to be in on a taut, under-2-hour Steven Soderbergh thriller, especially one starring Cate Blanchett & Michael Fassbender. And it’s a wife-guy movie? Every time. I’d watch 10 of these a year.
7. Wake Up Dead Man
I hope Rian Johnson makes 20 Benoit Blanc movies. I love a big ensemble cast, and even though it wasn’t the strongest cast of the three installments, we did get a standout performance from Josh O’Connor. He’s poised to be a name we hear much more from – already celebrated roles in Challengers and The Crown, and he’s starring in Steven Spielberg’s summer sci-fi movie Disclosure Day next.
6. Mr. Scorsese
A five-part documentary on Martin Scorsese, that’s pretty much all you need to know. I loved getting an up close and personal look at one of the all-time great directors. Thank goodness he has continued to make movies well into his 80s. Every movie he makes is another gift to film lovers.
5. F1
Top Gun Maverick but with fast cars. Sign me up. The racing sequences were electric and you feel the adrenaline rush at each turn. While it could have been a little shorter, I’ll still revisit this one plenty of times. The “aging-guy-who-mentors-a-young-hotshot” genre is always going to deliver. A perfect summer blockbuster.
4. 28 Years Later
Had a much better time watching this movie than I was expecting to – horror generally is not my go-to genre at all. Ralph Fiennes appears in the final section and elevated an already elite movie even higher. The best of the franchise.
3. Marty Supreme
I saw this on January 1, but I’m including it on the year-end list anyway. It’s that good. A propulsive, frenetic tale of chasing greatness. Timothee Chalamet gives the performance of the year, and I hope he wins Best Actor in a couple of months. Chalamet’s drive channeled into the character of Marty Mauser to perfection. I can’t stop thinking about it, and the next time I watch it cannot come soon enough.
2. One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson is well overdue for an Oscar, and this likely will be the year of his coronation. The Oscar frontrunner in several categories, it’s PTA’s largest scale film to date, and I expect it to be well rewarded this season. There’s a lot of dialogue and takes surrounding the plot and Anderson’s handling of Teyana Taylor’s character Perfidia – I’d encourage you to watch the movie and come to your own conclusions.
1. Sinners
Wholly original, one of the best films of the year, if not decade. Will be thinking about the juke-joint history of music scene for a long time. I love the Ryan Coogler-Michael B. Jordan collaborations and am eager to see how they work together and continue their partnership. I hope we get another 20-30 years of their movies. I will also say, I don’t normally enjoy a mid-credits scene, but the one in Sinners was top tier.
Nice list. Love the double Soderbergh picks. He still seems to be experimenting his style after all these years.