Best movies of 2025

When 2025 started, I decided to be a little pickier about movies, and not bother going to see the ones with a low Rotten Tomatoes rating unless I had some reason to suspect I would enjoy it more than the professional reviewers they survey. I'm not sure it made a difference in my movie-watching habits, because I ended up seeing even more new movies than I had around this time last year, and the ratings distribution looks pretty similar—maybe weighted a bit more towards 8s and 7s, which is good. It also didn't help that AMC Theaters expanded their A-List subscription to let you go to four free movies a week instead of "only" three, and I took advantage of this most weeks!

My number one favorite movie of the year is a sports movie, which is pretty unusual for me, although the original Bad News Bears is one of my top five favorites of all time. Eephus does have some of that feel, except instead of Gen X pre-teen losers, the teams are made up of Gen X middle-aged losers. And instead of charting their unlikely ride to the championship game, it's just one game, from the opening pitch to the final out. But it's a great demonstration of how a baseball game can have all the dramatic beats of a complete story, in fact many stories on different levels. I found it absorbing and affecting, and maybe you would too?

My number two movie, the only other one I rated a 9/10, is Fackham Hall, which is an incredibly silly satire of Downton Abbey. It's filled with gags, from puerile to intellectual, and made me laugh way more than anything else this year. It evokes the classic ZAZ comedies much better than this year's Naked Gun sequel did.

The list below is separated into groups by rating out of 10, and in descending order within each group. (I haven't rated anything a 10/10 in years, because in my mind that means "an old favorite that stands the test of time", and nothing recent has aged into that yet. Also, fortunately, I didn't hate anything enough to warrant a 2/10 or 1/10 rating this year.) I saw nearly all of these in movie theaters; the exceptions are marked with an asterisk (except I did see Thunderbolts* in a theater, it just has an asterisk in the title!). As usual, for me the 2025 movie year doesn't end until the Oscars award ceremony, so I'll post a final updated list after that happens—hopefully sooner than my 2024 list I finally just posted yesterday!

9/10 (great):

1. Eephus
2. Fackham Hall

   8/10 (really good):

3. Tornado
4. Predator: Badlands
5. Freakier Friday
6. Honey Don't!
7. Black Bag
8. Train Dreams
9. Trifole
10. The Ballad of Wallis Island
11. Good Fortune
12. Weapons
13. A House of Dynamite
14. Left-Handed Girl*
15. It Was Just an Accident
16. Pavements
17. Relay
18. She Rides Shotgun
19. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
20. The Phoenician Scheme
    ( 21-148 )

Here's my current list of 2025 releases I plan to see in theaters soon:

Wicked: For Good
Zootopia 2
Is This Thing On?
The Housemaid
Avatar: Fire & Ash
Marty Supreme
Anaconda
The Plague
No Other Choice
Father Mother Sister Brother
The Choral
The Testament of Ann Lee
Sirat
Dracula: A Love Tale

And a selection of other 2025 releases I would like to catch up with:
( Read more... )

Let me know what else I missed!