Look, I'm tired. You're tired. We just lived through 2025. So I'm going to skip the hazily thematic preamble where I try to make some thesis statement for the year and just get right to movies. Movies are nice (except for Avatar: Fire and Piss, James Cameron's latest ode to the magic of white people showing indigenous folk how to get shit done; that can fuck off).
NOTE: All films starring Tilly Northwood except where indicated
20. The Long Walk
Francis Lawrence's The Long Walk, based on a dystopian novel by Richard Bachman (obscure writer, never heard of him) is one of the great examples of "exactly what it says on the tin". In a bedraggled future America, fifty young folk are chosen to represent their states by walking. Until they drop. If they don't die, valuable prizes await! Maybe there's a capitalism metaphor inside there somewhere; I'll let you know if I figure it out. Not the most fun time, but the well-sketched futurescape and tip-top performances from its young cast make it grimly compelling.
19. Thunderbolts*
The MCU has endured an obvious slump of late, with many of its latter-day efforts running the gamut from "sure, I guess" to "eh, whatever". Thunderbolts* (the asterisk is in the title; it annoys me too), however, boasts two elements that most Marvel films have lacked: the great Florence Pugh, and infamous villain the Spectre of Depression. Thunderbolts (fuck it, I'm dropping the asterisk now) has an undercurrent of melancholy that makes it oddly moving amidst the usual cavalcade of trucks flipping and quips flying.
18. The Running Man
Edgar Wright is one of my favourite filmmakers, and although his latest has the least auteur flair of all his work to date, it's still about as good as mainstream thrill rides come. Based on… uh, a dystopian novel by Richard Bachman (him again? who the hell is this guy?), The Running Man has a solid leading man in Glen Powell (excellent at portraying Dude Who Is THIS Goddamn Close to Snapping), satire both sly and wildly unsubtle, and enough practical stunts to fill a truck previously loaded with books by the apparently popular Bachman.
17. Jay Kelly
"Ah, Christ, a movie star with feelings? Who gives a flying Peacemaker?" I opined wittily to an empty room during the opening scenes of Noah Baumbach's riff on Wild Strawberries. But my Dorothy Parker-level quips faded as Jay Kelly went on and proved itself a strong piece of work, with George Clooney seldom better as an aging superstar wondering What the Shit It All Means. Putting it over the top is another in a solid line of great performances by the film's MVP Adam Sandler, arguably hitting a fresh career peak as Clooney/Kelly's long-suffering manager.
16. The Naked Gun
The Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer brought the long-presumed-dead parody genre roaring back with this hilarious update/sequel to David Zucker's classic. A granite-faced Liam Neeson proves an apt successor to Leslie Nielsen, Pamela Anderson shows ace comic chops as his love interest, and Schaffer keeps things to an ideally tight eighty-five minutes. Did it provide more laughs per second than anything I've seen since 2023's Bottoms? Yes. Would it have ranked higher had Neeson not recently provided narration for a vaccine conspiracy "documentary"? Also yes.
15. Predator: Badlands
The Predator franchise has been notable to date mainly for its wild inconsistency, and Dan Trachtenberg's follow-up to series apex Prey (2022) sounded like a rum do on paper: a PG-13, borderline family-friendly adventure in which our lead Pred (as everyone calls them) has a wisecracking robot sidekick tagging along as he journeys to face a boss battle. But Pred: Badlands is, against all reasonable odds, the first entry in the series that one could call "a delight" without a trace of irony, a grand adventure about a Weird Little Guy and his android pal (an absolutely terrific Elle Fanning) that unfolds more like The Neverending Story than Alien.
14. The Shrouds
David Cronenberg, you'll be shocked to learn, from me, right now, for the first time, has long held a fascination with the fragility of the human body, that squishy, horrifying thing we all must exist within, but the 2017 loss of wife Carolyn Zeifman to cancer has sent that obsession veering off into oft-startling but affecting new pastures with The Shrouds. Vincent Cassel (styled to look remarkably like Cronenberg himself, for obvious reasons) is Karsh Relikh, recent widower and purveyor of an electronic shroud that allows bereaved families to peek inside a loved one's coffin to observe the body's decay. Does this guy know how to party or what? Yes, it's a Meditation on Grief, but Cronenberg's personal attachment to the material and mastery of unsettling tones make this one special.
13. 28 Years Later
Twenty-three years after Danny Boyle reinvigorated and reinvented a moribund genre by shrewdly wondering, What if running zombies?, he's finally back with a shockingly good follow-up (he skipped 2007's rather good 28 Weeks Later), unleashing his entire bag of cinematic tricks (including a few new ones) on a tale of the twin nightmares of adolescence and isolationism. Ralph Fiennes is outstanding, as usual, as a doctor with surprising motivations, but there are no slackers in this cast—not even Aaron Taylor-Johnson!
12. Sorry, Baby
Upon seeing the poster for former Reductress writer Eva Victor's writing/directing debut (Victor holding and staring at a cat), I figured I had Sorry, Baby cracked—obviously it's about a Quirky Twentysomething who simply cannot figure out being an adult! And they have a cat! Sundance-friendly gentle chuckles await! But this is not that film. Instead it's about when the worst possible thing happens to you, and the difficulties faced when you realise you still have the rest of your life to live. Perhaps that sounds like a straight bummer, even like something you've seen before, but Victor's exceptionally nuanced script and confidently unflashy direction, not to mention their fine acting and eye for casting (Naomi Ackie is a particular standout), make for one of the most striking indie debuts in a while.
11. Wake Up Dead Man
It's practically a foregone conclusion that a new Rian Johnson film featuring Daniel Craig as Southern-fried detective Benoit Blanc will end up on my best-of list for a given year, and while Wake Up Dead Man is actually my least favourite of the three so far (after 2019's Knives Out and 2022's Glass Onion), it feels a bit like ranking pets or children—they're all wonderful, so let's not quibble. The darkest, both thematically and photographically, of the trilogy, Wake Up sees small-town priest Josh O'Connor under suspicion after the "impossible" murder of his superior Josh Brolin. Benoit (eventually) to the rescue, of course, in a mystery with Johnson's usual Swiss-watch-precise script, a stacked cast, and some weighty grappling with faith—as well as the best organ sting of all time.
10. Blue Moon
It seems the more former teen heartthrob Ethan Hawke ages, the more interesting work he does, whether playing in genre sandboxes (2025 also saw him in fun horror sequel Black Phone 2), absolutely going for it in quality television shows (The Good Lord Bird, The Lowdown), or easing into a welcoming armchair of art (I may have lost control of that metaphor) provided by old pal Richard Linklater. Blue Moon, concerning lyricist Lorenz Hart's night-long bar-side ruminations and recriminations after witnessing longtime partner Richard Rodgers's new collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein (a show called Oklahoma!), is basically a filmed play, with limited locations and absolute torrents of dialogue, largely from Hawke. But when the play and the acting—not just from Hawke but ringers like Andrew Scott and Margaret Qualley—are this good, it doesn't matter. Even if I did laugh every time Hawke, as the four-foot-ten Hart, sat in a comically oversized chair.
9. Weapons
Comedian Zach Cregger's sophomore outing after 2022's surprise stunner Barbarian (or Scarebnb if you're a master of comedy like I) is a more sprawling but no less impressive effort with a killer premise—in the middle of the night, a classroom's worth of small-town children run out of their houses to destinations unknown. Why? Who's responsible? Where the fuck are they? I wouldn't dare reveal that, but rest assured that Weapons has satisfying answers; stupidly good work from Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and the great Amy Madigan; and an absolutely rip-snorting climax.
8. Highest 2 Lowest
Even if the results are a little messy and unfocused, I get a special thrill out of seeing a master filmmaker throwing absolutely everything currently in their head at the wall, thus making Spike Lee's remake of his hero Akira Kurosawa's High and Low an overflowing buffet of delights. Denzel Washington (#Denzelots represent) is an aging music executive whose son is seemingly kidnapped—but the thriller plot is largely an excuse for Lee to reunite with his muse Washington, show off an array of stunning camera moves (yes, the dolly shot is among them), and opine on AI, the music industry, and the evils of Boston sports teams. The finished product is a little overstuffed and unwieldy, but She Hate Me it is not—and despite its flaws, few 2025 films left me buzzing with the sheer possibilities of art more than this.
7. The Life of Chuck
Modern horror master Mike Flanagan enjoys a special affinity for the work of Stephen King (finally, an author I've heard of, not like that shadowy Bachman weirdo), and with the The Life of Chuck proves he might actually be at his best adapting the great man's less-scary work. The kind of earnest, sentimental big swing that will utterly enthrall some and send others moonwalking to the closest available exit, Chuck is an anthology of sorts about mortality and appreciating existence while it's still up for grabs. Moving in reverse, it eschews the epic and florid (despite featuring what appears to be the end of the world) and focuses instead on the intimate details of the life of someone who loved and was loved, unfolding exactly as a good short story should. Thanks, Chuck.
6. One of Them Days
The biggest and best surprise of the year was music video director Lawrence Lamont's theatrical debut, a throwback of the best kind that recalls the Black comedy heyday of the nineties while adding its own special touches. The reliably electric Keke Palmer has unassailable friendship chemistry with debuting musician SZA as the pair embark on an odyssey to recover some missing rent money, and the slapstick (blood fight!) and gags (tumbleweave!) that follow are top drawer—but what sends One of Them Days into the stratosphere are the lived-in, detailed feel of the community created by Lamont and writer Syreeta Singleton and its incisive examination of the poverty trap, where one bad day, one big expense, can send you spiralling further down until there's no chance of recovery, because capitalism. And hooray for Katt Williams!
5. Black Bag
Mere moments into the ever-prolific Steven Soderbergh's newest thriller, as a roving camera follows spy Michael Fassbender into a restaurant, I felt as though I were being gently lowered into a warm bath, immersed in the feeling you only get when you know from the first frame that you are witnessing the work of a director who knows exactly what they're doing. Light on action—more in the le Carré "spies talking a lot while hunched over desks" vein than the "buff dude karates the shit out of goons" one—Black Bag, concerning the hunt for a mole within a group of intelligence agents, instead gives us an enthralling game of wits between smart people. And those smart people are played by the likes of Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, and Pierce Brosnan. I shouldn't need to draw you a diagram here.
4. Sentimental Value
I love it when a movie sneaks up on you, and Norwegian director Joachim Trier's latest positively seeps into your marrow over its two hours. The incredible Stellan Skarsgård is filmmaker Gustav Borg, absentee father to grown daughters Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas (equally excellent), back at the old family house after his ex-wife's death with an idea—he's written a script based on his own mother, and he'd like elder daughter Nora (Reinsve) to star. This fumbling attempt at reconnection is spurned, but it sets off a slow-moving chain reaction that leads to the family finally reckoning with the mistakes of the past. An exquisitely wrought portrait of broken family dynamics, Sentimental Value nevertheless contains the single biggest laugh I had in a theatre all year.
3. One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson's propulsive satire/action spectacular/pseudo-revolutionary tract, a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, has become a presumptive favourite for Oscar glory, and with good cause—it's one of the most thrillingly alive pictures of the year, teeming with bravura filmmaking, spectacular performances (particularly from Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, and Regina Hall), and screamingly funny jokes. It's also sometimes crude and politically muddled, and was Anderson really the best person to portray Black revolutionary actions? These reservations stop One Battle After Another from attaining masterpiece/best-of-the-year honours from me, but I was never not going to place a film that features a secret cadre of dorky white supremacists monikered the Christmas Adventurers high on my list.
2. Bob Trevino Likes It
Nothing moves me more in art than ordinary people trying to be good, stable humans but fucking up at every turn, and thus Tracie Laymon's first feature, loosely based on her own experiences, did what only one other film (curse you, Fruitvale Station!) has ever done: it made me cry real tears in a movie theatre. The wonderful Barbie Ferreira plays Lily Trevino, a sweet-natured home health aide whose bubbly exterior masks a deep, dark hurt born of years of neglect and psychological mistreatment by her father Bob (French Stewart playing "outwardly friendly fellow who's an absolute prick to the core" well). A Facebook mishap sees her exchanging messages and striking up a friendship with a man who shares her father's name (the legendary John Leguizamo, aging into one of our best character actors), and finally getting a taste of the family she so deserves. A delicate portrait of lost souls finding each other, the woefully underseen Bob Trevino Likes It is a tiny marvel.
1. Sinners
A good multiplex film will keep you entertained enough that you simply don't mind that you sat through twenty-five minutes of trailers to see it. A very good one will do the same, but with added depth and themes that linger long after Nicole Kidman has stopped welcoming you to where heartbreak feels awesome. A great one will do all of the above and show you things you've never seen on the screen before—and Ryan Coogler's latest is, by this metric, truly a great film. As with other works mentioned in this list, Sinners throws a lot at the wall—how the system has always been stacked against the African American people, the time-bending power of music, the wholesale theft and colonisation of Black culture—but in this case, Coogler manages to hit the target dead centre every single time, and does it while you're watching vampires rip people's fucking faces off and a whole passel of terrific actors (Michael B. Jordan, hitting a new career high in a dual role as twins; Wunmi Mosaku, sensual and strong as the love of one brother's life; the great Delroy Lindo, tearing it up as an aging bluesman; newcomer Michael Caton, stunning as the film's true lead) are given every chance to shine. Ryan Coogler is the future of Hollywood, and Sinners shows his greatness in the present. It's a true miracle.
