Desperate times call for desperate measures in the best movies of 2025. Little movies continue to poke out like grass in the concreate in a system where the dominant movie-making machine – Hollywood – is creatively bankrupt, more motivated to make junk food content for second screeners about author-insert characters than tell a story anyone has to pay attention to. While we don’t have a lot of timeless universal themes running through these movies, we do have a lot of movies that capture the zeitgeist, either in filmmaking trends, tech trends or global economics that were spun into clever yarns by talented people. This year it was all about capturing “the moment” and while that normally bores me to tears, it still produced some inspired winners here.
1) Weapons
A good story, well told, or more, a unique, high-concept mystery unfolded in a puzzle-box style. Zack Cregger’s genre-blending supernatural horror movie was not only the most entertaining movie I saw last year, but a movie that takes the most interesting and complicated route at every turn (like having a child that isn’t a character narrate your story). Told in Rashomon multiple POV style that illuminates the conflicting motives of every character and unfolding to a physical (fightable) villain instead of a grief metaphor monster, Weapons refreshing busted every horror trope popular in Hollywood right now. Rich, thrilling, funny, creepy and confounding in equal measure, the worst thing that happened to Weapons was that it became a hit.
2) Sisu: Road to Revenge
Practically perfect in every way, this amped-up sequel continues the adventures of Jalmari Helander’s silent Finnish protagonist, this time as a Mad Max tale of vehicular carnage against the Commies. Where the prototype for this type of one-man-army action movie, John Wick (and we’ll get to that later), got more complex with every sequel, Sisu 2 slims down to a lean, mean, work of maximum efficiency. An action fan’s buffet of clever stunts, violence and visual gags that barely pauses a moment to let up. Helander turns his protagonist into both a legend and a Loony Tunes character contending with trucks, trains, planes, tanks – and a rocket.
3) Predator: Killer of Killers
So far, the middle part of Dan Trachtenberg’s reboot of the Predator franchise (between Prey and Badlands) is the best exploration of this character since the original John McTiernan film. With the surprise and mystery associated with this character long gone, Trachtenberg flips to his perspective in this animated anthology that finds Predators dropping onto Earth in different time periods (Viking Nordic, feudal Japan and World War 2 America) to face off against Earth’s fiercest warriors. Each story has a unique tone and setting; each one finds the predator dropped in the middle of an Earthly conflict and the way they are put together traces the evolution o our battle tech from swords and shields to massive war-making machines. It’s also a thrillingly violent action film, full of bits o inventively staged action, which unlike Prey and Badlands which spends a lot of time apologizing for the Predators, is unapologetically a Predator film.
4) Eddington
Leave it to Ari Aster to grab hold of one of the most divisive periods of recent memory, explore all of its nonsense and spin it into a purely entertaining genre film – instead of the self-aggrandizing lecture Hollywood can’t help but write when it comes to modern politics. Part Coen brother crime film, part broad South Park satire and part a uniquely Aster concocted nightmare, the director gleefully plays with the lit fuse of Covid era 2020 politics and spins it into a genre Wester/Horror hybrid that should annoy or satisfy everybody at some point in its epic but appropriate 3 hour run time. Despite its hyper-topical story, this one is built to last and should age like fine wine as a microcosm of what this era was like, where it wasn’t a virus that caused everyone to go crazy but a collage of selfish motives and personal power struggles. It also cements Aster and Joaquin Phoenix as a star/director power couple where Aster seems to delight in punishing Phoenix and Phoenix seems to go all in on being punished.
5) It Was Just an Accident
And speaking of the Coen brothers, they may be broken up but their influence looms large particularly over Jafar Panhi’s terrific Iranian crime/comedy about a mechanic who thinks he has come across his former torturer, kidnaps him and then rounds up a group of friends to confirm his identify and decide what to do with him, with increasing complications and moral tests. It’s a rich, wonderfully messy movie with surprising “oh, this is funny” dialog crashing into moments of emotional brutality. This movie has lodged itself in my brain since I watched it and rises on this list the move I think about it. A classic in the making.
6) Predators (2025)
No, we’re not going back to hulking alien hunters, this documentary focuses on the TV phenomenon of Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator, starts with an impossibly out-of-touch NPR academic premise (“Why was this show a hit?” Are you kidding?) and unfolds into a painfully personal exploration for the filmmaker to truly understand the unfulfilled promise of it. Tracing the rise and fall of the show, the rise of Hansen internet wannabes causing more chaos than good and bagging an interview with Hansen himself, Predators at first seems like an attempt to humanize sexual predators and turns into a story of how even the most noble of intentions can be corrupted in the process of turning it into content.
7) Frankenstein (2025)
In a sense, Guillermo Del Toro has been making Frankenstein movies for most of his career, so it would be fitting for him to finally get around to a straight period adaptation of the big guy for it to be one of the most satisfying, personal, imaginative and thoughtful adaptation of Mary Shelly’s classic to date. Told in two parts from two perspectives, The Doctor and The Monster, Del Toro teases out the themes and effortlessly turns them into a thrilling and satisfying experience, complete with some of the best set designs and practical effects of the year.
8) No Other Choice
It must be a pretty stacked year for the triumphant return of Park Chan-Wook to crime genre work to be so low on this list. No Other Choice is Park in his wheelhouse with very desperate people in very bad situations making very wrong choices in ways they aren’t ready to deal with. A crackling premise that places the film squarely in the zeitgeist of the 2025 job market, Park’s film treats the rat race as a mechanical humiliation ritual that this protagonist is trapped in. A surprisingly strong family film about men as providers, with Park’s trademark blend of inventive violence and humor. This one will be a time-capsule.
9) Companion
A cabin-in-the-woods horror movie about a fembot who extracts revenge on her controlling boyfriend shouldn’t be this good and yet it persists, through a clever script and several fun ideas that keep it remarkably unpredictable. Companion blends science fiction, romance and comedy into a movie with a strict set of rules and tropes that it plays with and turn into a series of twists and turns. This movie is a delicious, bloody ride – powered by a terrific performance from Sophie Thatcher – that predicts the smart-phone-run robot girlfriend future on our doorstep.
10) Ballerina: From the World of John Wick
Underworld helmer Len Wiseman is one of those directors that is only as good as the material he has to work with. Thankfully, the world of John Wick is very well protected, so much so that nobody in the production got the memo that movies aren’t made like this anymore. With this much craft, skill, effort and endless creativity in the variety of action. Ballerina is a great spin-off, but it’s heroine (a totally game Ana De Armas) fending off hordes of bad guys with whatever she can grab at the moment has more in common with Eastern and Indonesian action movies than the gunplay usually associated with Hollywood and Wick. Still, it is violence as ballet with show-stopping sequences involving ice sakes, close quarters grenades and the flame-thrower duel I never knew I wanted.
Honorable Mention: Nouvelle Vague, Bugonia, Train Dreams, Sentimental Value, The Ugly Stepsister, Sew Torn.