THE UNDISPUTED TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2025 (That I've seen)

People of the slop-infested, increasingly nazified internet! I am now ready to present to you the top 10 movies of 2025 that I’ve seen, as judged by the most incorruptible source imaginable, me!

 1. One Battle After Another

Has a 150min movie ever gone by faster? The intro, ostensibly set in the 90's, basically one-ups Tarantino in an expert and thrilling act of wish-fulfillment against the current fascist ICE roundups. The middle section, as the revolution is first knocked down and then as the timeline jumps to current day, doesn't let up the pace. While the juxtaposition between the defeated “hero” revolutionaries of French 75 and the quieter, more effective resistance of the entire immigrant town of Baktan cross is an important theme, the pure adrenaline of the Buster Keaton action-comedy led by the calm "sensei" Benicio Del Toro bouncing off the frantic and bumbling DiCaprio means the movie is never hitting you over the head. The final section features a car chase literally unlike anything in the history of cinema and the epilogue has a needle drop that seems to say PT Anderson may have been thinking of his own family the whole time. And you can’t forget the utter ridiculous, small-minded, but still menacing and dangerous portayal of the white supremacists including, but not limited to Sean Penn's terrifying Pynchonian Lockjaw. Just an incredible movie by one of my favorite directors.

 2. Sinners

Besides being a fun f*cking vampire movie with great performances from Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Jack O'Connell, and Wunmi Mosaku, this movie has a lot on its mind in text and subtext: racial politics, cultural appropriation, and a great belief in the power of music of all kinds, but especially, of course, the delta blues.  The detailed research Coogler put into this movie is apparent in the stunning period detail of downtown Clarksdale, watch as Grace Chow, the Chinese shopkeeper walks from the one side of the segregated street to to the other. From the time Jack O'Connell literally jumps onto screen as if shot out of a cannon to the bravura 6 min musical college in the club, to the terrifying Rocky Road to Dublin musical scene, to the epilogue with Buddy Guy this movie rocks.

 

 3. The Secret Agent

In another year, this would be my favorite movie of the year. I really enjoyed director Kleber Filho's Bacarau, but that relatively light film seems like just a practice piece for the emotional wallop of The Secret Agent. What a great movie, all Filho's great characterization and surreal sense of place acts in the service of a heartbreakingly relevant plot about people in 1970’s Brazil trying to survive as society falls increasingly under the sway of fascists and their violent thugs. Other than Wagner Moura and a couple of other ringers, the director seems to have a talent casting normal looking people off the street who bring their genuine life experience and texture to their roles.

 4. Marty Supreme

A film with the same frantic energy of Uncut Gems, but with events spread over several months in 1950’s Lower East Side and environs and a couple of continents worth of ping pong tournaments. Timothee gives a weirdly charismatic performance as a rat-like sleazeball narcissist with big dreams for himself and his little sport.

 5. Eephus

If you grew up playing or following baseball, this movie gets all the details and rituals just about right. If you've lived in Massachusetts for awhile, you've met or hung out (or maybe are) some of these guys. Even if you aren't any of those things, you can appreciate this weirdly elegiac movie about the last game of some very lumpy and unheroic amateur baseball players before they bulldoze the field.

6. No Other Choice

Dark, bitter, comical satire about a man who responds to his senseless firing after 25 years at the hands of a faceless corporation by scheming to murder his peers. A cinematic fever dream about a man who seems to be really capable and successful ironically turning those talents to murdering his peers instead of at the actual forces making him and everyone else miserable.

 7. It Was Just an Accident

A semi-comic movie about some everyday Iranians kidnapping and deciding how to deal with someone they believe to have been their ex-torturer in a political prison. There’s humor here, but there’s human tragedy and pathos right up to the last shot, which lays bare the stakes of everything that just occurred.

  8. Nouvelle Vague

Linklater made an extremely fun movie about the making of a new wave masterpiece. Miraculously, this black and white, french language film with actors that closely physically resemble famous personalities like Godard and Truffaut doesn't for a minute come off as pretentious.

 9. The Mastermind

It’s a Kelly Reichertian take on an art heist movie. As you may already suspect, the title is ironic, but Josh O’Connor’s character is too much of an egotist to figure that out. 

10a. Weapons

A damn good horror movie with a lot of twists and turns and some direct references to school shootings, even if it occasionally works the references too hard.

10b. Knives Out: Wake Up Dead man

This may be my favorite of the Knives Out movies. They’ve all been entertaining with a great ensemble cast, but director Rian Johnson has something more personal on his mind in this one. What is service and what do we owe each other? What do we owe the past and how do we forgive the people who live there? Should we stab people in locked rooms? Was Darth Vader the good guy?

Hounourable Mentions: 

Mickey 17

Hedda

Bugonia

Misercordia

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Movies That I Want to See But Have Not Yet:

• Sentimental Value

• If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You

• Sorry, Baby

• Train Dreams

• Sirat

• Blue Moon

• Eddington

THE UNDISPUTED TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2024 (That I've seen)

People of the scattering and dwindling internet! This is my indisputable and immutable list of the top ten movies of 2024 that I have seen. Note to future historians for context: I watched most of these movies during the dying days of the sclerotic American republic.

 1. La Chimera

Dreamlike (or maybe just “dream”) movie that owes something to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s never clear what's meant to be real as a riveting Josh O'Connor, rail thin, grubby with haunted eyes, begins the film asleep in an Italian train car dreaming of his lost love. We eventually learn he is able to find buried Etruscan art that seems to be under every trash strewn field in Italy, either due to a sympathetic connection to the artifacts or maybe just great dowsing techniques. He might have once been some kind of collector for museums, but usually he teams with a troupe of Fellini-esque criminals who sells them to mysterious buyers for short cash. Until he doesn't. Everyone seems to live in crumbling old villas, caves, and shacks, including an appropriately untethered Isabella Rosellini. You won't see another movie like this.

 2. Nickel Boys

Moving, lyrical and imaginative film shot from the point of view of its two black teenage protagonists, with frequent diversions in time (we see the one of the kids from behind in his adult life) and literally space (in this case newsreel footage of the Apollo 8 mission.)  The world is built from the details of what the characters see with their own eyes.. We learn the discriminatory environment of that world from their point of view: Like in an early scene the camera is the eyes of one of the kids as he watches the streets go by his bus window and two black teens walk into the street to get out of the way of a white woman walking the other way. The two become friends while incarcerated in a Florida "reform" school, one kid just trying to get through without making trouble, and the other, inspired by the contemporaneous progress of the 60's civil rights movement, thinking that if he can just communicate the moral outrage of the school to the outside world, he can fix the system. The denouement is not exactly a surprise, but it does add a level of meaning to what we've already seen.

 3. Brutalist

Adrien Brody brings his unique frame, face, and intensity to this indictment of the American dream, it's so-called "welcoming" of immigrants, and the dependence of all large-scale artistic endeavors on sociopathic wealth. But still, the movie can also be read as a paean to the triumph of the work over all of it. The cinematography is sweepingly grand and Guy Pearce is phenomenal in the role of the acquisitive, amoral patron. All praise also to the intermission on this 3+ hour movie. See it projected in 70mm if you can.

 4. Evil Does Not Exist

Even though evil doesn't exist,  the outcomes are the same and all the more tragic because of it. I've seen three of the director’s movies so far and each one is a strange, slow, empathetic masterpiece. In each, he really makes you feel strongly for his characters and their mostly innocous lives.

 5. Civil War

A documentary 2 years (or less) in advance. Intense, bleak movie imagining war correspondents coming home to cover the US's own collapse while on a back-roads drive from New York City to DC. Turns out, we ain’t so different. Jesse Plemmons' character is a pretty good avatar for the terror of present day MAGA-America

6. The Beast

A one-of-a-kind sci-fi spanning from 100 years in the past to 20 years into the future, using a star-crossed couple whose multiple entanglements in past and future lives explore romance, toxic masculinity and the emptiness of the modern age, and an AI future we're heading towards with humanity utterly devalued. Who is the titular Beast? What is the scream? Lea Seydoux gives an incredible performance, even (especially) when she's reacting to nothing but a green screen. 

 7. I Saw the TV Glow

A lot going on in this movie, is it an indictment or a love-letter to Buffy-type fandom and its in-group signaling? A sympathetic portrait of someone who's trapped in a repressive household in a small town who's literally dying to transition? A movie about kids getting into a really cool and lynchian YA tv show within the movie, which turns out to be not as cool as remembered when watched as an adult?  Yes.

 8. Nosferatu

Eggers does the scariest fucking movies when he wants. Imagine Coppola's Dracula, except with strong performances from all the actors involved this time, no punches pulled and dracula as a physically intimidating zombie with a badass mustache.

 9. Perfect Days

I've missed Wim Wenders humanistic work, like an art-film Jonathan Demme. Wenders manages to make a man who has decided to cut himself off from his friends and family look romantic: It’s Paris TX except the Harry Dean Stanton character is a guy who cleans the architecturally marvelous bathrooms of Tokyo and is played by great Japanese actor Koji Yakusho (Cure) who listens to Velvet Underground and Nina Simone on his van's cassette player.

 10a. A Complete Unknown

Well, hell. Chalamee is believable, even if he's no Cate Blanchette. A lot more of everbody's lefty grandfather Pete Seeger (in a good way) than I was expecting, loved Ed Norton in the role. The best parts were the Joan Baez/Dylan sparring. Turns out, when you make a competent movie based on all those good songs and interesting people, it’s fun to watch, even if the story isn't exactly new. 

10b. Substance

Is it way over the top and unsubtle? Yes. Is it also shocking and disturbing? Yes. Is Dennis Quaid appropriately cast as an exceedingly slimy TV executive? Yes.

Hounourable Mentions:  

Limbo: Australian desert noir where the main white detective re-investigates a long dead indigenous murder where (surprise) white cops had no interest in finding the killer at the time. It's filmed in black and white and set amid the very weird landscapes and opal mines of Coober Pedy.

Anora: The fairytale-turned-sour story is pretty rote, but the actors are all great, especially the lead and the "Russian" henchmen, and the energy of the film is undeniable.

Juror #2: Another kind of by the numbers plot about the failures of the American Justice System with some interesting turns. Clint Eastwood shoots it like a tv-movie, but Nicholas Hoult and Toni Colette and Clint's own moral outlook elevate the flat imagery.  No spoilers, but the ending put this movie on my list.

Furiosa: We probably didn't need another Mad Max prequel, but the story is good, the action sequences are as great as you'd expect and one of the Hemsworth guys is funny as hell.