Best of 2025
Howdy, Schlubs!
Would you rather have wall-to-wall hits? Or a handful of all-time greats? If 2024 was the former, 2025 has softly landed in the latter. There are plenty of movies I haven’t seen yet (No Other Choice, It Was Just an Accident, Blue Moon), but 2025 lacked the bite that set 2024 apart. Instead, we got some really solid movies and a few all-timers. Not to downplay my list before you even read it, but I found that a lot of the more genre movies I was anticipating (Marty Supreme, Sinners, Weapons) just didn’t hit for me. The result is a top-heavy list with plenty to recommend, and a few that are sure to be classics of the era.
I know it’s been a bit since the last essay, so I’ll be working on an update post next. In the meantime, be sure to pick up Monster Boom by Goodbye Press! I’ve been a fan of their work for years, and I was honored to write about Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie for this bonkers zine.
Thank you again for reading. Hope you enjoy the collages as well! <3
xoxo Gray
10. The Naked Gun
1998’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is the great American film. It’s a perfect example of how “we used to build shit in this country.” So, it’s with sincere relief that I say that Akiva Schaffer’s reboot is fantastic. Theatrical comedies have been dead for nearly a decade now, with maybe one or two managing to beat the straight-to-streaming death sentence. Even the rare comedies we do get are saddled with the baggage of having to be an “action comedy,” often mediocre on both fronts. Schaffer, a member of The Lonely Island and director of classics like Popstar and Hot Rod, is no lightweight in the comedy scene. Even with a less-than-ideal action set piece in the final act, The Naked Gun inspires confidence that theatrical comedies will be made legal again.
A legacy sequel to the Naked Gun trilogy, the 2025 iteration stars deadpan master and noted pants-pisser, Liam Neeson, as the son of Leslie Nielsen’s iconic police detective. Neeson is a comedy pro at this point and can easily navigate the sheer number of jokes-per-second in any given scene. Yet, it’s Pamela Anderson who emerges as the biggest surprise, showcasing physical comedy chops that would be welcome in any vaudeville act.
What else is there to say? It’s funny! Go watch it! To quote David Ehrlich’s review, “Writing about spoofs is like dancing about architecture.” And with The Naked Gun, you know you’ll be dancing to The Black Eyed Peas.
The Naked Gun is available to stream on Paramount+ and to rent on most other services.
9. Eephus
In Patrick Willems’ video essay Why Baseball is the Best Movie Sport, he states that, “baseball movies tell the story of 100 years of American history. Also, people hit a ball with a stick really hard…and it’s cool as hell.” However, there is another aspect just as important to the success of on-screen baseball: it’s boring. What other game lets you have an hour or more of conversation in the stands? Even the players have time to shoot the breeze with each other. Carson Lund’s Eephus, named for a pitch so slow that it appears to move in slow-motion, is a celebration of those boring bits.
Set in a small Massachusetts town in the 1990s, two rec league baseball teams meet for a final game before their local diamond is bulldozed to make way for a school. There’s another diamond a few towns over, but that’s too far, and it’s shoddily made, and the people who run it are assholes. For many of the players, and the five or so spectators, this will be their last game, which makes it all the more interesting that Lund barely shows any of the actual ballgame. Instead, the camera sits in the musty dugout, or the sunny outfield, or even the pizza truck rumbling in the parking lot. The crack of a bat or the sound of cleats on sand is background noise to the lackadaisical conversation among the players. Even hyper-local radio ads take precedence, as old men advertise their prime cuts of meat or roofing specialists.
This focus on conversation runs the risk of being too one-note, but Eephus keeps the intrigue high with the sheer diversity of its player roster. Guys who could have gone to the minor leagues, schoolteachers, barflies, over-competitive pricks, guys who just don’t want to be alone in their house—schlubs one and all. As the game goes on and the sunlight dims, a universal melancholy radiates from Eephus. These guys have been talking the whole day, but when the game ends and the league dissolves, they’ll probably never hang out again. They’ll say they weren’t friends—they were teammates.
Eephus is available to stream on MUBI and to rent on most other services.
8. Cloud
It’s last call at the money-bar. From nakedly corrupt leaders, celebs doing ads for lowest-common-denominator bullshit, to the complete inescapability of mobile gambling, everyone seems to know that the end of something is on the way. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has known this his entire career. Famed for apocalyptic horror classics like Cure and Pulse, Kurosawa brings his paranoid touch to the crime genre with Cloud. Set in the world of online reselling, Tokyo scumbag Yoshii (Masaki Suda) scams bulk sellers by reselling their dubious-luxury goods online for a higher price, dismissive of the growing negative reviews his shady online dealings earn.
Although the drama is (at first) relegated to the online world, Kurosawa paints a tangibly bleak portrait of modern Japan. It’s an empty world of grey concrete and pitch blacks. The corpses of factories might as well be ancient ruins. Yoshii’s day-job boss (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa), a sad-sack manufacturer, can’t rationalize why Yoshii won’t accept a managerial promotion he’s offering. He doesn’t know that the centers of commerce are now computer rooms, where Yoshii can earn insultingly high amounts of money, yet he can’t walk two steps without knocking over empty cans and takeout bags. This idea is made literal when Yoshii moves his operation to an empty office building in the vast woods outside Tokyo. Once a business, its sterile walls now magnify the paranoia emanating from Yoshii’s online dealings. The move to the woods pushes the story in a morbidly hilarious direction, exploring what happens when a comments section manifests in the real world. The shift from heightened tension to matter‑of‑fact violence is messy and uncomfortable, like a forum lurker suddenly trying to play gangster. Some viewers might see that same messiness in the filmmaking itself, where Cloud’s fluid tone and heavy‑handed allegories risk undercutting the operatic final minutes. Cloud isn’t perfect, but it’s an action movie as only Kurosawa can direct.
Cloud is available to stream on The Criterion Channel and to rent on most other services.
7. Castration Movie Anthology II: The Best of Both Worlds
A few days ago, a 4chan /lgbt/ meme came across my feed. It was a bearded soyjack with poorly painted nails. Above it, the greentext read, “> transitioning after 20.” If you don’t understand any of this, God bless you. There is a hyper-online and nihilistic contingent of trans women, calling other trans women “passoids” and other nonsense, and lashing out at those not infected with their cynicism. The influence these communities have isn’t small—their vitriol almost kept me from transitioning. It’s easy to view them as evil, but director Louise Weard’s second installment of her Castration Movie series chooses a lens of pity. Shot on grainy, SD cameras, Weard’s ongoing anthology series spans geographies and genres to depict various trans stories: sex workers, musicians, and even trans weapons dealers. The style is grimy, improvisational neo-realism, in which conversations play out in real time, and real-life events make their way onscreen (one actor’s top surgery was even shown in Anthology I).
Castration Movie Anthology II: The Best of Both Worlds is one of the more disturbing horror movies I’ve seen—a punishing, five-hour descent into the depths of Hell/Bushwick. Circle (a phenomenal Lex Walton) is a trans woman held prisoner by an orgiastic cult of trans women who worship an AI that espouses /lgbt/ 4chan-style talking points. Disillusioned, Circle escapes from her basement enclosure into the Bushwick night, only to find that everyone on the outside views her as a fetish object. Most notably, Keller (Ivy Wolk), a former non-binary woman who will stop at nothing to make Circle detransition so that she can fuck her “as a man.”
It’s a brutal watch. There are scenes that will never end. There is unsimulated sex, drug use, and what basically amounts to on-screen torture involving hot dogs, a kennel, and a bucket of semen. In spite of this, there are strikingly beautiful moments—both scripted and not. Warmth and hilarity flow through this disgusting gutter. There are lines and looks that cut into the bloody meat of what being trans means in 2026. If you can stomach it, get Castrated.
6. Sentimental Value
First off: is there some sort of Norwegian Uniqlo that I am unaware of?? Joachim Trier, I need you to drop the brand IDs immediately. The sweaters, the dresses, even the button-downs, are all immaculate. Beyond my sartorial needs, the clothes in Sentimental Value are a critical part of a greater whole. There is an almost overwhelming texture to Trier’s follow-up to 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. The wind snakes through the willows. Yellow streetlights rub the wet granite. Children’s dirty hands scuff the wooden paneling. Dozens of tiny details come together to form the family home of sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).
Sentimental Value follows Nora and Agnes as they navigate the return of their estranged director father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), after their mother passes away. Gustav returns not to offer any solace, but to offer Nora the lead role in an autobiographical film about his mother—his first film in 15 years. When she refuses, he offers the part to a young American starlet, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning). Gustav intends to shoot the film in the family home. The same home where his mother killed herself, and the same home where he left his daughters when they were still in grade school. Besides a few lingering looks at Rachel, Trier thankfully avoids an easier (and worse) story about the abuses wrought by old men in the movie business. Instead, he tells a sentimental (ayyy) and blisteringly true story about how parents shape their children. After Agnes’ son’s birthday, Gustav needles Nora about her lack of attachments. “Have kids,” he says. “They’re good for your art.” The sisters look to each other. Is that all they were? Good for his art? As the enormity of their story takes shape, spanning from WWII prison camps to a Netflix soundstage, it’s clear how Trier views the many disparate and challenging nodes of family: as a texture.
Sentimental Value is available to rent on most streaming services.
5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
In a world rife with therapy-speak, it can be tough out there for the true self-loathers. Chief among them in 2025 was Linda (Rose Byrne) from If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Directed by and co-starring Mary Bronstein, Legs follows Linda as she cares for her screaming black hole of a child. Never shown, only heard through offscreen screeches, Linda’s daughter suffers from a nebulous feeding disorder—barely held at bay via a disgustingly realized tube pumping grey slop through her belly button. Somehow, this is not the only black hole in Linda’s life. In an explosive opening scene, the roof of Linda’s luxury apartment caves in, leaving a moldy hole reminiscent of some eldritch deep-sea pit. With her husband away for work and her apartment unlivable, Linda and her daughter are forced into a crumbling beachside motel.
Despite the hilariously incessant needs of the daughter, Legs is less a screed against having children and more a cosmic horror film about the burden of self-punishment. Like if a tangled hair knot were a person, Linda is at once coming apart and folding violently inward. By leaning into her comedic chops, Rose Byrne manages to make us care about a character hellbent on self-hatred. Late in the movie, Linda is finally forced to attend a group-therapy session by her daughter’s doctor (Mary Bronstein). As the mother of another sick child breaks down, the doctor kindly states that it’s “not your fault.” Linda snorts. Her child came out of her. She made her. If she’s not to blame, who is?
It’s all rather bleak, but with both Josh Safdie and longtime Safdie collaborator (and Mary’s husband) Ronald Bronstein serving as producers, Linda’s journey takes on the classic Safdie momentum. Yet, it’s Mary Bronstein’s surrealist direction that ensures If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the best Safdie movie released in a year with two actual Safdie films.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is available to stream on HBO MAX and to rent on most streaming services.
4. The Secret Agent
Like many of the best movies this year, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent examines the bleakness of our current situation by looking to the bleakness of the past. Set in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship, The Secret Agent follows Armando (Wagner Moura) as he assumes a new identity to flee the country with his young son. Right from the opening scene, Filho establishes a tone of paranoia, gallows humor, and inexplicable swagger. On his way to the city of Recife during the holiday of Carnival, Armando pulls his bright yellow VW bug into a rural gas station. Clad in a loose blue shirt and several days of sweat, he’s looking good. Armando steps out of the car to wait for an attendant, but spies a rotting corpse in the parking lot, half-assedly covered with a sheet of cardboard. A disheveled employee tries to shoo off a pack of hungry dogs and says that they called the cops about it a week ago. At the mention, a cop car finally arrives. The cops step out of the vehicle, walk past the body, and shake down Armando for some petty cash. Life and death constantly entangle each other here. Armando takes a temporary job processing IDs, and on his first day he catches a security guard fucking a sex worker in the death certificate room. The disgusting police chief (Robério Diógenes) tells us that the death toll during Carnival has risen to 91, but we still see people dancing in the street. The Secret Agent is concerned with the people living between those two states of being.
I loved Filho’s 2019 John Carpenter-esque, Bacurau, but that was a scrappy revenge thriller. The Secret Agent is the confident brushstroke of a master. In a scene where Fihlo flexes on us all, Armando watches The Omen from the projection booth at his father-in-law’s movie theater. Sweltering from the machinery, he saunters over to the window and throws open the drapes, revealing a period accurate 1977 Recife. The camera lingers as primary-colored cars zip across the bridge, and cool blue waters rush below. Beyond the fact that costumes and set design are so breathtakingly realized, The Secret Agent is a cornucopia of thematic depth. I’m sure I won’t pick up on everything as an American, but Armando’s journey tackles colorism and racism in Brazil, anti-communism, industrialization, homophobia, the power of cinema, police brutality, and so much more—all while maintaining the rhythm and entertainment of a 70s political thriller.
The Secret Agent is available to stream on Disney+ and to rent on most other services.
3. Eddington
Ari Aster makes evil movies. Driven by a fey humor he finds in torturing his characters, his filmography has always remained cruel and emotionally distant to me. With Eddington, I’m finally in on the joke. Set in the radioactive crescendo of early 2020, the movie chronicles a mayoral race between sad-sack conservative, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), and technocratic Democrat shill, Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), as they battle for the heart and soul of the titular New Mexico town.
It’d be easy to dismiss Eddington as just a COVID movie, but Aster understands that COVID wasn’t just mask mandates and social distancing—it was a moment when the collective consciousness of America went insane. 2020 was a moment when all preexisting conditions ailing the American public spiked at once, reducing the average American’s headspace to that of a superstitious medieval serf. In Cross’s own home, his wife (Emma Stone), his mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), and Joe all subscribe to vastly different conspiracy theories, making communication impossible. The only unifier is the screen. Ever present. Unlike Cloud, where online anger is made material in the real world, Eddington’s action is performed for the explicit purpose of going online. For the seemingly aw-shucks Joe, the only times he can express his true intentions are when a camera is pointed at him.
By being chronically online, Eddington is trapped in the past and the future: mocking the behavior of the time and portending the doom to come. Freed from the masturbatory hokum that plagued Beau Is Afraid, this is Aster’s funniest movie. I struggle to think of a recent theater-going experience where I laughed harder than the shocking Kyle Rittenhouse allusion. At the same time, there is a deeply modern sickness roiling through Eddington. Aster conjures the year’s tensest scene with a Katy Perry needle drop, and the construction of an AI data center casts a Nosferatu-like shadow across the western desert. Eddington is a world trapped. Regardless of who is elected mayor, as long as we keep posting, the shadowy hand of tech will be served.
Blowback host Noah Kulwin put it best: “We live in a world of two truths: data centers and law enforcement. The rest is contested territory.”
Eddington is available to stream on HBO MAX and to rent on most streaming services.
2. 28 Years Later
The minute Danny Boyle cut to infrared footage, I was in. I had no choice but to put 28 Years Later in my top three. Early in the apocalyptic coming-of-age film, Boyle splices in sickly red footage of yellow eyes watching from the woods. These are the infected people of Great Britain: reduced to bloody shadows running through the underbrush. It’s only a few seconds, intercut with the main action like intrusive thoughts, but it distills the alchemy of folklore and modern technology that makes Boyle’s return to the franchise so sensational.
Set (you guessed it) 28 years after the 2002 classic, the world has violently quarantined the rage virus to Britain. The country, like an open wound, has been reclaimed by nature. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a 12-year-old boy living on an island off the mainland, protected from the beasts of the forest by a tidally blocked causeway. Together with his capital L “Lad” father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his bedridden mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), they live a relatively peaceful life on the island, which has reverted to a pseudo-medieval society tinged with a bit of football hooliganism. The ocean acts as a natural moat, the towering walls of the town are crowned with ballistae and longbowmen, and archaic roles and rituals are rigidly adhered to. When we meet sensitive little Spike, his father has decided to bump up his coming-of-age manhood ritual—together, they cross the channel to hunt infected with bow and arrow. What I expected to be the entirety of the film only occupies the first third, culminating in a staggering chase sequence lit entirely by the heavenly tendrils of the Milky Way galaxy.
What the film actually becomes is no less beautiful. Together with his mother, Spike returns to the mainland in search of an infamous doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who may be able to treat her deteriorating condition. With the folk horror sensibility that Boyle and Garland conjure, Spike may as well be searching for Merlin. The bloody ragdoll silhouettes of the infected among the lush rolling hills bring to mind the classics of British folk horror—made even eerier by the fact that it was all shot on an iPhone. The iconic potato quality of the 2002 original came through the use of modern (at the time) DV cameras, and Boyle recaptures that madcap unreality by switching to the iPhone. For a movie about a dead island, these bold choices and artistic risks keep it vibrantly alive, no more so than its final act, which radiates with compassion and love for the monsters. Similar to the brilliant limited series Station Eleven, 28 Years Later asks a dangerous question: why would we rebuild the society that ended the world? Honor those we lost and build something new. Memento mori. Memento amoris.
28 Years Later is available to stream on Netflix and to rent on most streaming services.
1. One Battle After Another
Funny, thrilling, gorgeous…and I’m not just talking about Benicio del Toro. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another captures the same “what it’s like to live in 2025” feeling that Eddington did, but without making you want to kill yourself. Loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, OBAA follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up revolutionary trying to save his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) from Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the fascist goon who brought down Bob’s revolutionary militia 16 years earlier.
It’s 16 years later, but as the movie says, “the world had changed very little.” The battles are the same, but who is left to fight them? Once a world-class demolitions expert, Bob has been reduced to ripping his vape during parent teacher conferences and quoting theory at the TV while rolling a joint. A schlub thrust back into the fight he left years ago, Leo’s performance is his best since The Wolf of Wall Street. Adorned in a bathrobe while falling from rooftops and out of cars, he’s like if Jeff Bridges’ The Dude was forced to survive The Revenant. Even with all that praise, Leo feels firmly part of an ensemble. I don’t put much stock in The Academy Awards, but there’s a reason why OBAA is running the table on acting categories this year. Sean Penn, returning to the world of PTA after his hilarious bit part in my beloved Licorice Pizza, is a human stick up the ass. His polar opposite is Benecio Del Toro’s Sergio, a Modelo-loving sensei radiating warmth and moral clarity. Despite having limited screen time, Teyana Taylor is already sweeping the award circuit as Willa’s deadly mother, Perfidia. While Regina Hall’s temperature dropping performance as the last revolutionary standing is the most underrated of the year. It’s a deep bench of talent, each given time to make their play by PTA.
As with Eddington, there is a caustic blend of hyperreality and reality that simulates what living right now is like. OBAA showcases the everyday sicknesses of America: immigration internment camps, police brutality, even Lockjaw is a spitting image of ICE goon Greg Bovino. Scattered among these are militant nuns, the Baktan Cross underground railroad, and the Santa worshipping white supremacist cabal—all just a smidge too far from reality, but close enough to disorient the audience. Luckily, PTA’s direction is kinetic enough to keep us from totally spiraling out. PTA’s set pieces have always drifted toward the grandiose, but I would have never pegged him as someone who could direct action, let alone two of the best car chases in recent memory. Off the road, Bob’s rooftop escape stands as the most electric sequence I’ve seen all year. As Bob cheeses it across the skyline of Baktan Cross, the silhouettes of his skateboarding guardians are illuminated by the Molotov fires burning from the immigration raid below.
“We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years,” Serigo assures Bob during the raid. It’s a depressing notion that we’ve been fighting this fight for so long. However, OBAA doesn’t mean it like that. They’ve been coming for us for hundreds of years, and we’re still here fighting.
One Battle After Another is available to stream on HBO MAX and to rent on most streaming services.
Special thanks to Max Seifert and Rose Burton.
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