10 Favorite of 2025

Watched exactly 100 movies from this past year. This out of 219 total for the year. First was Get Away. Last was Neighborhood Watch. Neither of them made my best of, though Neighborhood Watch was a lot of fun. 
 
Some honorable mentions include The Smash Machine, Weapons, Companion, Bugonia, The Shrouds, Invader, Marty Supreme, and Dead of Winter. Any year I struggle to put just 10 movies on my favorite list is a good year. 
 
A lot of these are “better” than the films on my list, these are just the ones that are my 10 favorite.

Tie—10. The Monkey
 
The third twin movie on this list. It’s not a perfect movie. Star Theo James is much more believable as the cool, dickhead brother. 
 
Based on a Stephen King story. I read this three or four years ago before watching Monkey Shines, which I thought was based on King’s work. It wasn’t, but is still awesome. 
 
This is the only of Osgood Perkins’s three movies I’ve really cared for so far, the other two being Longlegs and Keeper. Here he delves deep into his personal trauma. His father, Anthony Perkins, you know, Norman Bates, died when the director was young of complications of AIDS, which he contracted as a closeted gay man. His mother, Berry Berenson, also an actress, was on American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. Perkins has said as much, saying specifically it’s about the melancholy of living. How casual tragedy becomes, like with the priest treating the funerals as a joke. Most of the deaths are funny as hell. But it’s inevitable, tragedy, death, and it comes in ways you don’t see coming, but is always just around the corner. Embrace the absurdity of living, this film says, or you are gonna have a hard time. That’s my brand.

Tie—10. Mickey 17 
 
The first third is amazing. The second third is solid. The last third, especially in the last 20 minutes, is lame. However, overall, it was fun and silly and my kind of shit. 
 
Bong Joon-ho doing a sci-fi satire. Definitely one for me. Saw complaints about the tone, but I personally loved that part of it. Sort of silly, yeah, while dealing with real issues of life and death in a fucked up time. I found it consistent and good for what the film is. The Running Man it was not. 
 
Stars Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Pattinson is the clear star, though. He does an amazing job of playing the “Expendable” (Mickey Barnes) in another sort of twin movie. He is part of a group that goes to a distant ice planet with the job of dying repeatedly. Once expired, he is reprinted with his memories intact. Uses this setup to rail against capitalism, authoritarianism, and humanity’s hubris. Lot of absurdist gallows humor. Also doesn’t skrimp on the feels. And what a time to release a movie about how those in power see people and resources as disposable.

9. F1
 
Any time Brad Pitt is in a movie, it is probably gonna end up on my list at the end of the year. This was so bad ass. Crazy visuals and sound. Glad I saw it on the big screen. There were times when I was stunned. Only happens every so often. I think the last time before this year (the hill scene in One Battle After Another also got me) was Oppenheimer. Before that, Nope. The race footage is that good. Hell, this was one of my favorite sports movies. Doesn’t hold up to the best of the Rocky/Creed movies, but I’d say it could hang with pretty much anything else. 

8. Freaky Tales

This technically came out in 2024, but you couldn’t see it anywhere until 2025. So I’m including here.
 
God, I’m a sucker for whacky, blood soaked anthology movies. Throw in the summer of any random year from my childhood. And set it in the Bay area. And toss out some obscure 1980s NBA. Goddamn. 
 
This wild, nostalgic ride blends punk, hip-hop, crime, the supernatural, and basketball into a four-part anthology that’s is pure chaotic energy. Solid, fun ensemble cast led by Pedro Pascal (who absolutely kills it), Ben Mendelsohn, Jay Ellis (the best part of the movie), Normani, Dominique Thorne, Jack Champion, Tom Hanks (who is amazing), Too Short, that Angus Cloud kid that died a couple years ago that I keep seeing in movie, and Marshawn Lynch. It is a crazy good time and ends on the highest of notes. 

7. Jay Kelly
 
Movie about looking back after a lifetime of success and realizing you fucked up. Watched this the day before my sister’s wedding. A wedding I was officiating. Seemed like the best movie possible going into the occasion. 
 
While I loved it, it kind of lost me in the last 30 minutes before correcting course to stick the landing. This wonderful meditation on aging, legacy, power, perception, family, stardom, celebrity, celebrity worship, friendship, brotherhood, betrayal, and guilt. Yeah, it’s pretty great.

6. Dead Mail
 
This was a movie my friends and I were watching trailers for movie night, noncommittal on what we wanted to watch when we came across this. Everyone was instantly enthralled. Goes back to the 1980s Peoria, Illinois to tell a story with high creep factor (actor John Fleck is always unsettling) and loads of suspense involving physical mail and one of the effortlessly coolest characters I’ve ever seen, Jasper, played by Tomas Boykin. Co-directed Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, if you have some nostalgia for video store finds from childhood, genre fans so of course you are, this is the perfect Saturday night flick with other cinephiles.

5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Ever feel like you’re on the edge? Well this is the movie for you! It’s also about massive holes, both real and metaphorical.  One of two really solid mothers under extreme stress movies this year (the other is Die My Love). In this one Rose Byrne stars as a woman that is worse off than being alone. All the men in her life (her neighbor played by A$op Rocky, her absentee husband played by Christian Slater), hell, pretty much everyone in her life (example: the hotel manager played by Ivy Wolf), is actively working against her. 
 
No one listens to what she needs, offering what they think is best, things that are not at all helpful, never giving her any answers about what she can do to help her child and herself. “Why won’t you listen to me! I just want someone to tell me what to do,” she tells her psychiatrist, played by Conan O’Brien. This while people like her child’s doctor, played by director Mary Bronstein, tells her “I’m on your side here.” But she’s not. Setting unrealistic goals for the child’s progress. “You set us up to fail,” Byrne says. The only person that seems to understand is a patient of hers, Caroline, played by Danielle Macdonald, who is contemplating murdering her child. She at one point abandons the infant with Byrne, saying “you know” in a way that acknowledges the horror at the center of the movie. 
 
Just Bronstein’s second movie. Her first since Yeast from 2008, which starred herself, Greta Gerwig, and Benny Safdie. Gerwig seems to have been in roughly 100 movies from 2008-2012. This one is great and should be required viewing by shitty dads. 

4. Good Boy

Oh my god. I cannot even write about this movie without crying. Yet another example of how we don’t deserve dogs. This is an awesome take on animals being able to see into the spirit realm. I don’t think any film has made me cry more. Love that Indy, the dog star of the film, is raking in awards. He is really the best boy. I LOVED this film. 

3. Eddington

Another film that I absolutely adored that I suspect will be in my top 10 for the decade. A Covid movie about mask mandates, political divisions, and unwillingness to compromise, even when it means death. 

Shares some DNA with Needful Things, except the thing that they all want is a speck of power.  We basically see a man whose desperate grasps for authority results in further loss of power/control, a guy that can’t get out of his own way. He’s not the only one, of course, as everyone lives in their own separate reality. Everyone realizes there is something wrong, but what that is and who they blame is different, even though in the end, they all have the same enemy. 

 

Great performances from a great cast—Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, and others—another Ari Aster home run. His fourth film—Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid—he hasn’t made a bad movie in my book. For me, this and Midsommar are my favs. 

2. Sinners

 

One of three movies I watched this year where a single actor played twins. Most years this would have been my favorite film. There is a polarizing scene where past and present come together and time gets transcended. I thought this was genius. However, I could hear people laughing and mocking this in the theater on opening night. WTF? I’ve talked to people that felt both ways. Regardless, amazing music and story and an abrupt needle drop that flips the genre from a musical drama to horror. If it stuck with one genre, I still would have loved it.  Michael B. Jordan is incredible, as are Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo. The guy that looks like Popeye Jones is pretty solid, too. Incredible flick. 

1. One Battle After Another

 

Easy favorite of the year. Hell, this is in the running for my favorite movie of the century. In the company of Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Zodiac. Also the only movie I’ve ever seen four times in the theater. Went as Ghetto Pat for Halloween even. I absolutely adored this movie. Anyone who didn’t is a loser and probably MAGA.