Films of 2025

2025 was a rough year. Rough on democracy. Rough on humanity. Rough in terms of how many icons and legends passed away. The year was rough on pretty much everyone and everything except billionaires and giant corporations trying to figure out how to own what's left in the world to own. As usual, the film industry is a microcosm of what's occurring in the greater society. By 2025, most streamers, such as Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, etc., had realized there was no infinitely-growing monetary future in the platforms they had invested so much in, and they stopped throwing money at prestige filmmakers to provide them with content. This predictable outcome, combined with film companies chasing U.S. state tax incentives and cheap overseas labor, caused film and television production in Los Angeles to hit an historic low. Then David Ellison's Skydance company acquired Paramount Global, which paved the way for his future purchase of Warner Bros. If that deal goes through, and there's no reason it shouldn't since the billionaires who own Congress all but did away with anti-trust law years ago, this powerful right-wing multibillionaire will control Paramount, Warner Brothers, CBS, CNN, TMC, HBO, BET, TNT, The CW, Showtime, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, MTV, Nickelodeon, Miramax Films, the DC Cinematic Universe, Harry Potter, and the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok. Such is the media landscape we have to look forward to.

The bleakness of this year was reflected in many of its best movies. Two films, Eephus and Sirât, sum up 2025 as if looking back and looking forward. Eephus, Carson Lund's elegiac slow-cinema sports picture about an amateur baseball league playing the last game before their local field and run-down wooden stadium is demolished, plays like a metaphor and a eulogy for everything that seemed like a permanent, unquestioned, treasured aspect of American culture for dozens of generations—including baseball as our national pastime, cinema-going as our favorite form of entertainment, and democracy as our system of government. Sirât, Oliver Laxe's hypnotic metaphysical fever dream about an unprepared, ill-equipped father and son blindly following a benign group of nomadic hedonists into a war zone in the Moroccan desert plays like a metaphor for the unknown, but likely disastrous, future we all seem to be collectively heading into as if we had no other option. Both of these movies struck a chord with me as I watched them for the first time, and I see them both as profound meditations on the current state of the world.

My favorite film of the year, however, is not a bleak nor wistful picture, though it isn't exactly a light romp. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value is a film that feels both timely and timeless, dealing with familial trauma, estrangement, and the power of art to transcend, without magically healing, these issues. I was surprised to find myself referenced in the review of Sentimental Value by the film critic Sean Burns. In his review of the film he says, "A cranky Gen-Xer friend of mine has a pet peeve about what he calls 'millennial wish-fulfillment movies in which chastened parents end up apologizing to their kids for not raising them correctly. It's driven him up the wall in everything from Everything Everywhere All at Once to that terrible new Springsteen biopic. Sentimental Value is something like an answer to that trend, a literate, sophisticated comedy about accepting the flawed people in our lives and meeting them where they are." The term I used is actually "Millennial Apology Porn," but Sean is correct that Trier's wonderful picture plays like an antidote to the type of shallow movie I've complained about for years, in which some kind of performative parental apology is the protagonist's ultimate goal and the thing that enables them to overcome the emotional obstacles preventing them from achieving fulfilment. What we get in Sentimental Value is far more subtle and far more truthful, and therefor infinitely more satisfying than a hug in a parking lot.

I guess I can't have become too cynical or nihilistic if the film I responded to the most was a movie about the value of human connection and the power of making art. Still, when your favorite movie critic in his review of your favorite movie of the year refers to you as a "cranky Gen-Xer," you need to take notice. So, without doubt (and despite the many irritating aspects of cinema these days), 2025 had a lot to celebrate. The best aspect of the year was the sheer diversity of films, not just on offer but that people actually went out to see. While the crop of talked-about movies seemed smaller, the talk was more substantive. It was far less about box-office numbers, social media-related effects, and "What does this mean for the future of cinema," and more about the actual content of the movies.

At the Oscars the span of style, theme, genre, and subject matter was also distinctly wide, with Best Picture nominees ranging from F1 to Train Dreams. There were only 35 feature films nominated for the Academy Awards this year, as opposed to the usual 40 to 60. But, refreshingly, not all the films were released during the so called "awards season," which often leaves us with nominated movies that few regular folks have yet to see. Ryan Coogler's Sinners was an April release, yet that did not prevent it from receiving 16 Oscar nominations, breaking the long-standing record of 14, previously held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016). This new record wasn't reached only because the Oscars added a new category, Best Casting, which Sinners was eligible for and won. Coogler's film is a messy but wildly entertaining period vampire musical, impressive and deserving of attention in the range of areas covered by the Oscars. If the Academy hadn't merged its two sound awards five years ago, Sinners might have racked up 17 nominations.

The year 2025 was also notable for the many great comedies that came out. I have long lamented on this blog that the improvised approach to comedy as launched by Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller, and then driven into the ground by those who came up through their school of thought and pracitices, has all but ruined movie comedy. The desperate attempt to score as many laughs per minute as possible has come at the expense of narrative credibility, honest characterization, visual aesthetics, and earned emotions. I was thrilled, therefore, to see Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin's Splitsville break completely from this trend. The sophomore outing by this writer/actor/director team delivered a movie comedy obviously crafted through meticulous writing, planning, working out beats, and carefully layering jokes and gags. That film proved that trusting that what creators thought was funny during each stage really is funny, and that sacrificing the visual aspects of comedic storytelling—just so that you can have twenty different versions of a joke to choose from during the final stage of editing—is a sucker's deal. Watching this ingeniously conceived and expertly executed comedy was one of the year's distinctive pleasures, though few saw it.

Another great comedy that people went to see was the surprisingly hilarious remake/reboot/legacyquel, The Naked Gun. Like most folks, when I heard that The Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer was attempting a remake of the much-loved David Zucker/Jim Abrahams/Jerry Zucker spoof movie classic, I thought it was an insane proposition. How could anyone copy and update the distinctive ZAZ approach to comedy for an era in which there is no longer a monoculture, and in which more than half the ticket-buying audience is offended at many forms of humor. But somehow Schaffer, his co-writers, and his cast pulled it off, not only without embarrassing themselves but delivering one of the funniest studio comedies we've gotten in many, many years.

Documentaries also had a notable year in 2025, in terms of both approach and innovations. Now that we basically live in a surveillance state, it was fascinating to see how many of the year's best docs were made by filmmakers working with vast amounts of footage collected by governments and other authorities. The best example of this trend was the Oscar-nominated The Perfect Neighbor, in which director Geeta Gandbhir and editor Viridiana Lieberman built a compelling film from two years of police bodycam footage and 911 calls. A less dynamic but still intriguing doc was Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. In that film, director David Borenstein and editors Nicolaj Monberg and Rebekka Lønqvist use footage that their subject, Russian school teacher and A/V guy Pavel Talankin was required to film for the Russian Government to ensure that new indoctrination policies were being followed by the teachers and the students. When Talankin left his country, the footage he was ordered to film by Vladimir Putin's administration became the material used to damn Vladimir Putin's administration, rendering Talankin an undercover spy working completely in the open. The year's best documentary was the still unreleased WTO/99 by Ian Bell. It uses only archival footage taken by participants and reporters to paint a complex and detailed picture of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. By showing the many thousands of protesters from every conceivable American background gathered at this WTO conference, and the police they interacted with, WTO/99 preserves and publicizes a valuable record of what happened and why. It raises awareness about many of the disturbing trends I lamented earlier—the increasing power of globalization, corporate conglomerates, and concentrated wealth.

The wonderful Secret Mall Apartment used footage taken by a group of artists who, as an act of quiet revenge on the corporate forces who had destroyed their work and living spaces, secretly build an elaborate, habitable dwelling in an unused corner of the Mall in Providence, Rhode Island, that had displaced them. This documentary is a fascinating time capsule in that it showcases how much has changed in America in terms of security and surveillance. (Today, one could never get away with what these folks did nearly thirty years ago.) It also highlights how people used to do art and political actions for their own sake rather than to gain visibility and notoriety. The idea of people doing a political action and a risky, laborious, and time-consuming art project that fewer than thirty or so people would even know about is almost unfathomable in our contemporary click-bait, media attention-seeking culture.

These documentaries overshadowed the more traditional ones like 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Mstyslav Chernov's follow-up to his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol. This film should have been one of the most powerful and acclaimed docs of the year, but it got almost no play despite its harrowing first-hand account of Ukrainian soldiers attempting to retake a small town from the Russians via trench warfare. Chernov had footage nearly as riveting as in 20 Days in Mariupol, but Americans had moved on from thinking about the war in Ukraine, so the film hardly made a dent in the collective conscious. Similarly, The Alabama Solution, got less than expected attention. In trying to capture an underrepresented perspective in a unique way, directors Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman attempted a fresh storytelling technique, sneaking contraband cellphones to prisoners inside Alabama prisons. But in the end, I just don't think Jarecki and Kaufman had enough footage to pull off what they were attempting.

It was much more difficult for the doomsaying Op-Ed writers who every year go on and on about how movie-going is a dying art because so many people went to the movies in 2025. Not just to see Sinners and the Academy's Best Picture winner One Battle After Another, but also Weapons, 28 Years Later, Marty Supreme, F1, Superman, KPop Demon Hunters, and, of course, the latest in the must-see-must-forget series, Avatar: Fire and Ash. James Cameron's third immersive 3D trip to Pandora was just as unnecessary as the previous two but managed to be the best Avatar movie so far, because it finally introduced a decent villain. Despite being the third highest grossing movie of the year, Cameron began hinting at the idea that this Avatar installment may be the last in his planned five-film series, since these movies have become prohibitively expensive to make. Almost as many people came out to see A Minecraft Movie, though that wasn't so much for the chance to be transported to a fantastic 3D world, but rather to participate in the viral TikTok phenomenon of reacting boisterous to moments in the film that had been memes on social media—a Rocky Horror Picture Show for the cellphone generation.

One factor that got people out to the movies in 2025 was the continuing resurgence of 35mm and 70mm presentations, which this year expanded with VistaVision screenings. Four theaters installed vintage projectors capable of running the horizontally threaded large format that One Battle After Another was photographed in. I've been a longtime champion of screening films on film, but I have to say that the One Battle rollout was just the most high-profile example of the year's most depressing cinematic trend. I mark 2025 as the year when releasing a movie on 35mm, 70mm, or any other celluloid format shifted from being something demonstrably special, to more of a marketing gimmick. When a new movie was released on film it used to mean you had the chance to see it in the best possible way. Not only because theaters reserve their best cinemas for celluloid presentations, but because properly projected film had always been superior in many ways to digital. Those conditions were not the case for the new movies I saw this year that were released on film.

Sinners looked ten times better in Digital IMAX than on 70mm. On 70mm, everything looked dark. Worse, it harkened back to the days when cinematographers didn't know how to light for actors with dark pigmentation, which is most assuredly not something this film is trying to capture. I know the 70mm projectors where I saw Sinners were calibrated to the studio's exact specifications (which is actually part of the problem, as brightness and sound levels are dependent on a large number of factors that vary from theater to theater). There's no question that One Battle After Another looked demonstratively better in VistaVision than in 70mm. (I didn't see it in digital IMAX). The sharpness, resolution, color, and compositions were superior. Plus, the print was clearly made off the original camera negative with none of the noise or digital artifacts I saw on the otherwise pristine 70mm print I first experienced it from. But all four cinemas running One Battle in VistaVision had to have their prints replaced after just a couple weeks of the most careful, meticulous handling due to how damaged they got after just a few dozen screenings. So unless you were able to see it during the first few days of the print's life, that sharper image was marred by visible damage to the images. That fact alone tells you all you need to know to comprehend what a stupid, wasteful, arrogant gimmick it is to release a picture in a format that was never meant to be used for theatrical presentation.

All the new releases I saw projected from film prints this year felt poorly processed and/or poorly projected. But what confirmed for me the shift in film presentation from value-add cinematic experience to profit-add marketing gimmick was the release of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. Did Tarantino, arguably the biggest champion of celluloid and seeing films on film, go back to his original camera negative of Kill Bill when combining his two-part epic into a single movie? Did he and/or cinematographer Robert Richardson carefully supervise a blow-up from the original 35mm negative to new 70mm prints? No. Tarantino essentially took the 2K Blu-Ray transfer, spat it onto 70mm film, and then made a big deal about reissuing it on the large format, complete with a premium ticket price and bonus sequence. This epitomized for me the current state of the exhibition side of the industry, at least with new releases and now apparently "restorations." These ill-conceived re-releases, which take something that used to be truly special, make it generic and call it an improvement, make me sad.

Still, perhaps all this new emphasis on and awareness about film presentation will cause audiences and critics to be more discriminating and demand better from studios, theaters, and filmmakers. Perhaps the next big celluloid release, Christopher Noland's The Odyssey, the first film to be shot entirely in 15-perf IMAX film, will mark a change. But I doubt it. On the other hand, this new demand for celluloid has been a wonderful boon to the aspect of moviegoing that I care the most about—repertory screenings. Since the COVID-19 pandemic lifted, younger generations, fed up with living their lives on screens, have been flocking to movie theaters to see classic films in cinemas the way these films were originally released. Movies ranging from expected rediscoveries like Titanic to formerly unloved bombs like Barry Lyndon are having second and third lives during this current celluloid renaissance. Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick's critically panned three-hour period piece now regularly sells out arthouses, especially when screened on 35mm, which showcases its glorious photographic inventiveness.

This celluloid resurgence has been doubly exciting to me as this year I started to program films at the cinema I now am part owner of, rather than just doing my own little series in my basement screening room. In the spring of 2025, I joined with the long-time managers of the Boston area's oldest movie theater, the 111-year old Somerville Theatre—which has been screening movies since before films had sound—to take over the business of running the historic cinema as well as two other venues. It has been exciting to move even further into the exhibition side of the film world, trying to program film series that will appeal to the ticket-buying public rather than just me. It's also a challenge since booking and licensing films from studios and distributors for paid public screenings has many more restrictions and limitations than just playing whatever one wants for one's friends at home. But it has been gratifying to program movies and then stand in the back of our 800+ seat movie house to watch an audience watch the movie. A highlight for me was running Airplane! back-to-back with Zero Hour as part of a Great Remakes series I put together. The print of Airplane! was pristine, and it was a thrill to see how well that 45-year-old genre-changing spoof movie played to a crowd all these decades later.

We were also able to program a number of tributes to many of the film legends lost in 2025. So many giants of cinema passed away in 2025 that it's hard not to feel these deaths as part of an undesirable and inevitable sunsetting of the art form. Even though independent cinemas like the Somerville had one of their best and more profitable years in 2025, one wonders how long it can last. Among the significant filmmakers now gone are David Lynch, Robert Benton, Michael Roemer, Marcel Ophuls, Ted Kotcheff, Jonathan Kaplan, James Foley, Lee Tamahori, George Armitage, Henry Jaglom, Jacques Dorfmann, Tom Stoppard, Rob Reiner, and Robert Redford. The many acting legends who died in 2025 also leave a sense of a diminished scene. Gone are the incomparable Gene Hackman, Terence Stamp, Claudia Cardinale, Joan Plowright, Val Kilmer, Graham Greene, Joe Don Baker, Diane Ladd, Geneviève Page, Harris Yulin, Richard Chamberlain, Tatsuya Nakadai, Peter Jason, David Johansen, Wings Hauser, Udo Kier, Brigitte Bardot, Samantha Eggar, June Lockhart, Sally Kirkland, Tony Roberts, and Diane Keaton. These significant losses feel like a curtain being rung down. The Oscar Ceremony's "in memoriam" tribute was especially long and poignant for everyone the community lost in 2025.

It was certainly a very full year. Full of loss, full of new opportunities, and full of a people going to movies both old and new, which is perhaps the most hopeful thing about 2025. In the late spring, my friends Billy, Harrison, and I launched a monthly Movie Trivia Night at another of the venues I'm now a co-proprietor of, the Somerville Theatre's Crystal Ballroom Every month, 80 to 130 people pack themselves in to play rounds of advanced-level movie trivia. It's heartening to see how many people keep coming for this show, and it is a show as much as it's a game. A hunger yet to be satiated is certainly still there for experiencing cinema in fun, communal ways. I'm here for it for as long as it lasts!