The Best Films of 2025

The best movies of 2025 showed us how to live differently. That’s what the movies always do, they bring us into the orbit of lives different from our own. This year though, I’ve never felt I needed their guidance more.

Much of our mediated social lives is now spent reading about others’ mistakes, casting judgement from the distance of a screen, and worrying about undergoing similar critique. Movies don’t do that. Rather, they invite us to witness how people make decisions and where those choices take them. Like all great art, the films I gravitated toward most this year brought me close to the imperfect lives of others (deadbeat dads were a common theme) with sympathy and tenderness, always leaving the door open to redemption. Exorcising trauma was a big theme of this year. As was returning from the battlefield of one’s own mind into the wider world of community—something I hope may be instructive for more than just myself.

After all, movies bring people together—at least in the old fashioned theatrical sense of sharing space with others immersed in the same narrative. Their ongoing role as a communal ritual seems suspended in jeopardy, dependent on the whims of a few billionaires. But that’s a problem for 2026. For now, let’s celebrate the improbable bounty of a very chaotic year. 

1. Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value is a movie about many things: a study of acting methods, a satire of Netflix, a legal battle for a family home, a holocaust ghost story. What sets them in harmony (besides director Joachim Trier’s sumptuous cinematography, knockout needle-drops and smart editing) is the theory that trauma can be passed down in families for generations on end, only to be transcended when properly acknowledged and shared. Trier shows viewers how art can be both a part of that cathartic healing process, as well as a petty excuse to inflict one’s pain on others. The difference is often a matter of nuance, to which Sentimental Value is uncommonly perceptive. 

Trier’s follow-up to 2021’s charming and self-absorbed Worst Person in the World was so good because it was so unexpected, reprising Renate Reinsve in the role of lead actress, but opening up her world to forces far greater herself. The film’s lighthearted tone obscures the fact that it’s constructed like a maze of cause and effect. And yet, Trier was kind enough to build his labyrinth with an exit. His sympathy and compassion for every one of his characters reached me like a salve during a very dark year. 

2. One Battle After Another 

One Battle After Another really defined 2025, a year when federal troops occupied at least 10 US cities with the goal of deporting migrants and intimidating the vulnerable. The events of the film bear an uncanny relationship to our political present, and even its internal logic of timekeeping seems strange: Between two acts that both seem set in the present, an infant grows into a teenager. It sometimes felt like Paul Thomas Anderon’s breathless epic was staging a battle with our postmodern sense of time itself, attacking the neoliberal order’s belief in “the end of history,” which is really a complacent faith in the continuity of values that can still erode before our very eyes. 

With a gonzo sense of humor that shuns political correctness, One Battle tried to wake people up. It’s unclear whether the film succeeded in this effort—much like the fate of the French 75, the group of militant underground leftists at the center of this movie, its political achievements are qualified at best. But its power of imagination still feels tremendous. 

3. The Testament of Ann Lee

Nobody knew they needed a choral musical about the 18th century founder of the puritan Shaker movement until Mona Fastvold made it, but its power is undeniable to those who bear witness. Shifting nimbly between scenes of breathtaking spiritual transcendence and moments of high camp, the film is a riveting call to worship that will alter viewers’ breathwork during its heavily ventilating scenes of spiritual expiation. It invites us to gasp and exhale alongside it.

Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) who was born in 1736 in Manchester and died in 1784 in upstate New York, declared herself a new messiah—Jesus Christ returned in the body of a woman. The film smartly avoids weighing in on this through depictions of miracles, focusing instead on the value of her everyday worldly deeds. After arriving in the United States in 1774 in search of new followers, pristine villages seemed to sprout up around her via pure force of will. The Shaker social contract exchanged a lifetime of chastity for a community where everyone cares for all, without bemoaning past transgressions or original sin. Fastvold’s film takes seriously the idea that she might have been onto something, that there may yet be better ways to come together. 

4. The Chronology of Water

Kristen Stewart’s criminally under-appreciated directorial debut does for its source material (a memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch) what RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024) did for Colson Whitehead’s novel. It bends the rules of traditional filmmaking to arrive at a perspective better suited to its narrator’s experience. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that both books dealt head-on with personal trauma, the power of which can easily be mishandled in film. A careful touch requires recalibrating the medium. For Chronology of Water’s, Stewart employed a completely original approach to editing to convey repressed memories and buried flashbacks, which haunt without menacing. The movie becomes a mosaic of such fragmentary moments, revolutionizing Imogen Poots’s already forceful performance as Yuknavitch. This was a risky film for any director to make, but the greatest danger to Stewart’s career is that it remains unseen by a wider audience. It reveals an artistic sensibility too ambitious to discount and too exciting to ignore.

5. It Was Just An Accident

Jafar Panahi’s latest is a fable about the necessity and impossibility of forgiveness. Set in Tehran, this spare and aggressive tour de force revolves around a group of former dissidents, who spring into action when one of them crosses paths with someone he believes to be their old prison guard (Ebrahim Azizi). Desperate for revenge but doubting his own intuition, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) disrupts the lives of his fellow former inmates so they can verify his hunch. 

An outspoken dissident himself, Panahi has been imprisoned several times in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and has endured abject mistreatment inside (he was recently sentenced in absentia to serve an additional year for “propaganda activities” in relation to his promotion of this film). The stakes of It Was Just an Accident are personal, and the best outcome for his characters is far from clear. Rather, Panahi’s film exists as its own exercise in catharsis, a way of acknowledging pain without expecting it to ever go away, and calling out the futility of returning the blow. 

6. Pillion

The rom-com has become an endangered species in an era when heterosexual romance is harder to celebrate than skewer. Even ostensibly standard genre fare seems to knock love down a peg, weighing in against its own will about the uneven distribution of sexual power (hello, Materialists). As heteropessimism reigns unchecked, it’s been gems of queer cinema like Pillion that give me the most hope. 

Harry Lighton’s debut feature certainly documents an uneven distribution of power: Colin (Harry Melling) sleeps on the floor of Ray (Alexander Skarsgård)’s bedroom, and is forbidden from kissing him until further notice. But their relationship proves empowering to Colin nonetheless, allowing him to revel in the joy of his own submission. Lighton uses BDSM as a tool for emotional leverage, taking a hyperbolic lens to desire and longing. Pillion is as tender and earnest as a ‘90s Julia Roberts movie; I hope the assless singlets and dog collars won’t prevent it from being appreciated as widely.

7. Peter Hujar’s Day

The photographer Peter Hujar died in 1987 relatively unknown. He has since become one of the defining photographers of his generation, the incisive eye on bohemian life in 1970s New York. Peter Hujar’s Day, which stars Ben Whishaw as the historic figure, bases itself entirely on an interview Hujar conducted with his friend Linda Rosenkrantz (played by Rebecca Hall) in 1974. While the film offers insight into his artistry, lifestyle and relationships of that period, its real cinematic virtue is rescuing a moment in time. On this recorded day, Hujar is hardly certain about his purpose and the impact of his work. To say he’s unaware of his impending legacy is an understatement: He’s more preoccupied with the cost of cigarettes. This cinematic treasure reminds us that art moves at its own pace, one that can often be frustratingly indifferent to the lives of the people that make it. 

8. The President’s Cake

The hero of Iraqi director Hasan Hadi’s searing debut is Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), a nine-year-old whose pure heart and transparent wisdom make her a powerful foil in a land of corrupted authority. Her social obligation to bake a cake for Sadam Hussein’s birthday leads to such stress and mayhem that it could have been scripted by Josh Safdie. The film conveys the unfathomable poverty that ordinary Iraqis faced during the global sanctions that followed Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s. Convincingly recreating the war-torn country of his childhood, from the marshes of Mesopotamia to the dusty streets of Baghdad, Hadi pulls off a tremendous feat for Iraqi cinema, securing the country’s first shortlisted submission to the Academy Awards with a critique of the global power system that left his nation so forgotten.

9. Silent Friend

The star of this slow, mysterious movie is a ginkgo tree located in a German university garden. Its costars include French film star Lea Seydoux, Swiss breakout Luna Wedler, and the legendary Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Ildikó Enyedi’s meditative journey across eras of tree-time quietly collects evidence for a theory of plant consciousness, while simultaneously making a case for slow cinema, all sunlight and breeze. While its findings are speculative, it’s enough to change the way one might look out a window, imbuing an appreciation of nature with the excitement of new ways to explore and experience the world.

10. Drop Dead City / Below The Clouds

These two documentaries examine the tangled social lives of large urban centers—the kind that I and over half the world’s population now live in. Below the Clouds focuses on present-day Naples under the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, a violently active volcano. While Drop Dead City examines 1970s New York, on the cusp of defaulting under billions of dollars in debt. They’re about as different in style and tone as two documentaries can be, yet both filled me with similar questions about civic responsibility—from a government to its citizens and the other way around.

What do we owe one another? What acts of service are absolutely essential, and what would it mean for society if they were to disappear? How much of this can ever be taken for granted? Such considerations felt like some of the most essential and urgent topics of discussion across the world this year. As these films make clear, these cannot be answered alone. Through trial and error in the face of impending doom, we’re going to have to work together to figure them out.