Josh’s Favorite Films of 2025 December 7, 2025 by Josh There’s still a lot of year left, but I had to submit a ballot for the Seattle Film Critics Society’s annual awards this week, so I’m going to treat this as a non-anonymous awards ballot and share this snapshot of my top films of the year as they stand at this particular moment. Comparing film years is always challenging. Looking at my list from last year , 2025 might be a little more fun (but still, so much trauma), but there are fewer films on this one that I’d defend with my life. I’m not sure what that means, but it was still — as ever — a year with some very good movies. Here are a few of them. Warner Bros 10. Sinners (Ryan Coogler) From its dual lead performances from Michael B. Jordan as Smoke and Stack, Ryan Coogler’s expansive IMAX-scale epic is full of doublings. Vampirism as a metaphor for assimilation; waves of immigrants pitted against each other by nefarious evil profiteers of labor, strife, and stagnation; generation after generation of young people eager to make their mark. Be it a sharecropper dreaming of following his passions away from his preacher father’s life, or brothers returning home to make their piece after a stint double-crossing the gangs up north, its a story of strivers. Coogler’s mythmaking can be corny as hell but it becomes spellbinding through the depth of its commitment. Gothic horror, sultry passions, and the transdimensional power of music unite in a tremendous achievement that’s as fun as it is powerful. The mid-credits scene is as perfect an ending as it gets, but if there must be a sequel or extended universe, please let the first installation be about the Choctaw quartet who have the good sense to go home after the sun sets rather than get embroiled in the bloody nightmare to come. Sinners is currently streaming on HBOmax. Netflix 9. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson) Rian Johnson’s star-studded mystery parties just keep getting better and better. This third installment finally finds a worthy co-lead from Daniel Craig’s Foghorn Leghorn-voiced detective Benoit Blanc in the form of Josh O’Connor as a reformed pugilist priest who gets embroiled in a small-town parish murder case. He’s incredibly good at this (it’s my favorite of his many great performances this year, which also included playing an art thief in The Mastermind, a rancher devastated by wildfire in Rebuilding, and a tortured turn-of-the-century musicologist in The History of Sound). Reckoning with ancient questions of faith and modern concerns of cults of personality, the relentlessly amusing whodunnit is a warm embrace in a world of wolves. Wake Up Dead Man is playing at the Landmark Crest ; see it with a crowd if you can. It streams on Netflix beginning December 12. Focus Features 8. Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos) The relative crowd-pleasing mode of idiosyncratic wonder and fisheye lensing of Poor Things (and even The Favorite) has been left on the shelf. Reuniting with regular creative partner Emma Stone and Kinds of Kindness star Jesse Plammons, Yorgos Lanthimos reimagines South Korean sci-fi Save the Green Planet! with a pitch-black comedy of misplaced convictions written by Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu, The Regime). Certain that they can avert the Earth’s impending destruction, a pair of cousins kidnap a local pharmaceutical executive and hold her hostage. The most clever part is that even without the interplanetary suspicion, the depiction of their lives and mindsets shows that they might as well be from different worlds. As their caustic standoff escalates in a dingy basement, tools of corporate communication run into a wall of unshakeable belief. It’s not easy to like any of these people, but the film succeeds in being both provocative and thoughtful in the way that it refuses to play coy as it culminates with revelations of layers of tragedy and the truth of the imagined threats. Bugonia is available on PVOD rentals. Roadshow 7. Twinless (James Sweeney) This twisty unlikely friendship comedy about a pair of lonely Portland guys who trauma bond via a support group for bereaved twins who face life without their biological doubles has stuck with me since Sundance. Dylan O’Brien brings remarkable depth to the role of the surviving straight bro whose void is filled by similarly grieving gay guy whose insecurities and embrace of the new friendship are played perfectly by writer/director James Sweeney. The brilliant structure of his storytelling initially situates us with one perspective before expanding to reveal some important details, leaves the audience queasily complicit as the film reinvents itself and reconfigures our loyalties. Sweet and funny, with inventive uses of filmmaking techniques, and a valiant effort to re-introduce new audiences to the anthemic pop pleasures of Evan and Jaron, it vibrates throughout with insightful melancholy. Twinless is available to rent or buy on various VOD platforms . Focus Features 6. Hamnet (Chloé Zhao) Adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Chloé Zhao’s rich text of the natural world, romance, and grief also (spoiler) happens to be an origin myth for one William Shakespeare. Rather than a basket of Easter eggs to explain the Bard, its concerns are firmly lodged in Jesse Buckley’s riveting performance as his wife Agnes, the domestic concerns of family, mystical connections to nature, and the crushing uncertainties of life and death. Paul Mescal shows us the young playwright as an attention-divided family man who sparkles with charisma. It’s a deeply felt movie that’s already become famous for its effects on the lacrimal glands of its audiences. We’ve perhaps become too cavalier in tossing around the word “shattering”, but there is simply no other word for the physical effect of Jessie Buckley’s theater-piercing wail of despair or Paul Mescal’s transmutation of unceasing waves of grief in the wake of the death of a beloved boy. Roll your eyes if you must, but there’s power in relishing in a messy cry in a dark room of strangers. It’s hardly a perpetual downer though, with its big moments deployed strategically amid a tapestry of love and joy. It’s with this extraordinary dexterity that Chloé Zhao divines the alchemical power of art to stretch across an unknowable gulf, hinting at something tremulous and meaningful on the other side of impossible sadness. Hamnet is now playing in theaters. A24 5. Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor) This list is a turning out to be a case of “oops, all trauma!” but the array of approaches makes them feel so different. Here, writer/director Eva Victor uses nonlinear chapters in a wondrously wry exploration of the ways that a violation ripples through the life of a college English professor and the slow ways it heals (and sometimes doesn’t). In a quietly stunning lead performance from Victor, we follow her recovery as she experiences the unexpectedly transformational powers of cuddly creatures found along the way, be it dear friends, a surprisingly sensitive sandwich vendor, an adorable abandoned kitten, or a sweet neighbor played by Lucas Hedges. Quietly revelatory, touching, and funny in equal measure, the film’s culmination finds its heroine breaking from her usual dry self-deprecation to deliver one of the year’s great closing monologues. Sorry, Baby is available to stream on HBOmax or rent on various VOD platforms. Searchlight Pictures 4. The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold) Mona Fastvold’s formally daring depiction of the dawn of Shakerism is wildly ambitious, befitting the life story of an 18th Century woman who believed herself to be the living embodiment of God on earth. A maximalist epic of carnal asceticism, it hits somewhere between a holy Suspiria and a depiction of the founding of the original dance church, crackling with life through song and ecstatic movement. In the title role, Amanda Seyfried’s luminous eyes and expressive demeanor make for a convincing messianic figure whose chief spiritual revelation was of abstinence as the gateway to enlightenment. Surrounded by a faithful cast including William Pullman and Thomasin Mackensie as the most faithful in her flock and Christopher Abbott as a comic relief husband desperate for a blow job, the film simultaneously regards unflinching belief as both inherently silly and also deeply meaningful. With a core belief arising from a series of personal tragedies, she leads her followers to the New World, fosters a growing egalitarian community, and steers the flock in the face of persecution, all the while building a legacy of austere craftsmanship. Its an ethos echoed by the film’s impeccable “everything in its right place” production values, with every element from cinematography to screenplay to score working in harmony to convey something mysterious and profound. The Testament of Ann Lee arrives in theaters on Christmas Neon 3. Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) Joachim Trier’s marvelously constructed movie uses an Oslo home to introduce the story of an estranged father and daughter who have transmuted the trauma of parental abandonment into their work rather than working on their issues. Renate Reinsve plays a tightly-wired actress who channels her anxieties onto the stage. Stellan Skarsgård, her film director father, faded from family life after a divorce and hates live theater. After the death of her mother, the fading auteur returns to the family home with the idea of filming a passion project animated by a tragedy of his own childhood there with his daughter in the lead role. It’s a sort of willful optimism and obliviousness from a charmer who fails to appreciate that he and his daughter can barely speak, let alone work together. His hiring of a Hollywood star who’s seeking to make more meaningful adds yet another layer of mirroring (that it’s Elle Fanning, doing this sensitively reflective work makes for a hall of meta). This might sound very fussy and literary, but it is an intricate structure that unfurls with such precision that you barely notice what it’s up to until it swoons to full bloom and bowls you right over. Sentimental Value is currently playing in theaters A24 2. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) Levitating out of our seats, directors with the juice, absolutely electric. The Ringer-coded vernacular has rapidly become ubiquitous and stomach-churningly filmbro-pilled, but goddamn if that isn’t how watching Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme made me feel from its , um, hilariously explosive opening sequence through every breathless minute of the ensuing two and a half hours. Guilty as fucking charged, I guess. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a charismatic dirtbag who will say or do anything in service of his unrelenting quest to claim the table tennis world championship. He should be easy to despise, but the way Josh Safdie directs his crusade with the confidence of his hero’s convictions, backing up his bravado with thrilling ping pong action sequences, keeps us on his side. A prickly Odessa A’zion and poignant Gwyneth Paltrow hold their own as the women caught in the tornado of his ambitions. It has all the unyielding anxiety of Uncut Gems, but is so brilliantly textured with a huge cast of oddballs, moments of delight, opportunities to catch our breath, and a thread of optimism that it’s far more fun. I’m desperate to see it again, but it just might be my favorite movie of the year. Marty Supreme Christmas Day, Marty Supreme Christmas Day, Marty Supreme Christmas Day, Marty Supreme Christmas Day, Marty Supreme Christmas Day. Warner Bros 1. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson) … but if Marty is my favorite, One Battle After Another is firmly the best of the year. Paul Thomas Anderson is easily my favorite director and when I saw his film a second time last month in Boston at one of the handful of theaters actually playing the Vistavision print, there was no doubt about my number one spot. It may be true that despite all the thrilling revolutionary acts of radical justice depicted the prologue, the world had changed very little. But Leonardo Di Caprio’s stoner explosives expert has been deeply transformed by fatherhood. It’s this supreme devotion to protecting his daughter (a stunning debut from Chase Infiniti) that animates the breakneck narrative that spans evergreen sanctuary cities and the wide open rolling hills of the California desert when a cartoonish nemesis in the form of Sean Penn emerges from the past to erase an inconvenient truth by marshalling the full force of the state. With deep empathy for the human hearts that find connection in revolting against a world in perilous decline, Anderson’s film is charged with comedy, insight, and nonstop action that hurtles toward a phenomenal conclusion. It’s enough to make even most skeptical amongst us believe, at least for a moment, that revolution might actually stands a chance. One Battle After Another is available on various VOD platforms. Notes and clarifications: Other Special Mentions and Ramblings on the Year: My perception is that this year was not great for documentaries, but maybe that’s simply because nothing compared to Pavements, which probably should’ve made my best picture ballot if I was less of a coward. I don’t know that anyone has ever fused music documentary, mockumentary, and sincere tribute quite like Alex Ross Perry. Fusing real footage of their iconic band’s reunion tour and typical biographical elements with dueling behind-the-scenes style productions of a prestige band biopic, earnest jukebox musical, and MoMA art retrospective, it blurs every possible boundary in a hilarious genre-exploding portrait that doesn’t even require fandom to appreciate. Similarly mind-blowing and uncategorizable, yet not in regular release beyond city-by-city one-off roadshows: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. Leveraging decades of footage from the episodic work of Toronto comedy duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, its an ingenious deeply Canadian big-screen reinvention of Back to the Future, impossible stuntwork, prank show style incorporation of everyday people, and a riotously enjoyable movie to see with a crowd. I hadn’t seen a frame of their TV show and couldn’t stop laughing. Stay tuned for a 2026 release, you’ve got plenty of time to catch up on the series. Even though this list doesn’t include any of them, it was a hell of a year for Steven Soderbergh who released three excellent features: his single POV ghost story Presence (which made my list last year), crackerjack marital spy thriller Black Bag, and a contemplative art-fraud two handerThe Christophers at TIFF (picked up for 2026 release). Other honorable mentions: the outstanding ensemble that made up Eephus‘s River Dogs and Adler’s Paint reminded us why there’s no such thing as meaningless day in baseball; with similarly exquisite cinematography and performances Ira Sachs did the same to refute the idea of a day in the city where nothing much happened with Peter Hujar’s Day. The Pacific Northwest may never again look as beautiful as it does in Clint Bentley’s stunning, revelatory telling of a quiet life of meaning for a turn-of-the-century laborer in his adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. On the international front, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident was a potent study in the limits of revenge; Dea Kulumbegashvili’s stunning April reckons with the consequences of living one’s convictions; and Kleber Mendonça Filho puts Wagner Moura’s magnetism to optimal use in The Secret Agent, deciphering the fog of camaraderie among political refugees in 1977 Recife. Supreme anxiety on the domestic front was very much on the menu with Mary Bronstein’s sublime showcase for Rose Byrne as a mother driven past the verge of a nervous breakdown in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which had the courage to acknowledge that children can be extremely trying and emotionally manipulative. In contrast, the anxieties of fatherhood and the call to escape it all were handled much differently in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, an imagining of a 1970s art heist with a shabby Josh O’Connor at its vanishing center. The most fun I had in a theater was going into Weapons without ever having even seen the trailer. Zach Cregger’s fractured narrative made the spooky story of a classroom of missing children constantly fresh, moving so brilliantly between perspectives that you never stop to question the logic. Kathryn Bigelow’s sobering A House of Dynamite used similar methods — propulsive storytelling, perspectives shifting from the periphery of power to its very center — to shatter illusions of competence as a shield. That so many found the ending vague or unresolved speaks less to a failure of filmmaking and more urgently to our inherent inability to recognize the titular existential threat. My full SFCS Nomination Ballot, for anyone who wants to know how the artisanal regional critics awards sausage is made. Some of the ordering reflects trying to elevate some undersign films via the power of ranked-choice voting. PICTURE Source: https://thesunbreak.com/2025/12/07/josh-favorite-films-of-2025/