By 
If 2024 felt transitional, 2025 felt reactionary. The industry is still figuring out where it’s future is heading, with streaming turbulence, downsized theatrical slates, and the lingering specter of automation hanging over the heads of everyone from below-the-line workers to A-list actors. With the recent news of the landmark WB acquisition, the future is very much in a state of alarming flux. But even with cinema at a crossroads, a number of films showed up with blood dripping from their teeth in 2025. 2025 didn’t just have good movies, it had some of the very best movies of the whole decade. And I put in the work to find that out for myself. This year, I watched 109 new releases and wrote 67 reviews. The top four films from this year (all which earned a grade-A) could duke it out with any other recent release for supremacy. Even though art is, I guess, subjective and all that.
Per my totally made-up rules for myself, it’s worth getting into the movies just on the cusp of making the list this year, including the franchise-best horror joint Final Destination: Bloodline, one of the most balls-to-the-wall fun splatter flicks of the year; Mary Bronstein’s devastatingly anxiety-provoking If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, featuring a career-best turn from Rose Byrne; Richard Linklater’s Lorenz Hart biopic starring Ethan Hawke, a film that proves when Linklater and Hawke align, the product is almost always magical; Spike Lee’s riff on the Akira Kurosawa film Highest 2 Lowest, about a music mogul played by Denzel Washington caught up in a kidnapping plot; Sundance body-footage doc The Perfect Neighbor, as devastating as it is essential viewing; the openly delightful music drama The Ballad of Wallis Island, featuring a perfect trio of Tom Basden, Tim Key, and Carey Mulligan, and best watched with your mom immediately; Sorry, Baby, about a woman struggling to move forward after a personal incident, which saw the breakout of Eva Victor; Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper’s humanist story about a romantic separation turned amateur stand-up career, starring never-better Will Arnett and Laura Dern; and Bring Her Home, which continued the Philippou Brothers’ feel-bad horror hot streak.
Every year the math changes. And I am sure I’ll look back at this list in the coming weeks, months, and years with a mix of pride and regret. But such is list making. For the calculus, some films earned their place on my list through pure craft. Others stick with me because of a mood, a performance, a series of interesting choices. A few are just so undeniably “of the moment” that not including them would feel wrong. And then there are the wild cards: the film that surprised me, disturbed me, or refused to be shaken off. Now onto the finalists…
10. NO OTHER CHOICE
Leave it to Park Chan-wook to turn corporate downsizing into a blood-soaked moral reckoning. No Other Choice is a razor-sharp social satire dressed in the skin of a revenge thriller, following a middle-aged white-collar worker (a sensational Lee Byung-hun) who, after being laid off, embarks on a darkly comedic, increasingly desperate mission to eliminate the job market competition, literally. Park mines this premise for both laughs and dread, using Man-Su’s unraveling as a stand-in for the modern man crushed beneath a collapsing labor system and a looming A.I. reckoning. Equal parts Parasite, American Psycho, and The Ax, this is one of Park’s most controlled, potent efforts in years: elegantly shot, perversely funny, and chilling in its relevance. “Survival of the fittest” given a modern highbrow lift. [Full review here]
9. LURKER
There’s a long tradition of stalker thrillers, but Lurker brings a fresh, 2025-flavored chill to the subgenre by fusing the parasocial obsession of modern fandom with psychosexual unease. Théodore Pellerin delivers a skin-crawling performance as Matthew, a retail drone turned leech-like documentarian who insinuates himself into the life of rising pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe). What begins as admiration slides quickly into invasive manipulation, until it’s not clear whether Oliver is the victim or the one thriving off the relationship’s twisted feedback loop. Directed with icy precision by Alex Russell, Lurker plays like a collaboration between Gregg Araki and Jonathan Glazer, with its sleek visual grammar, suffocating close-ups, and emotionally weaponized intimacy. A minor-key fame-trap nightmare with major staying power. [Full review here]
8. HAMNET
With Hamnet, Chloé Zhao trades the elemental vastness of Nomadland for something even more intimate: the devastating, slow-motion shattering of a family undone by loss. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s novel and loosely inspired by the death of Shakespeare’s son, the film stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as parents attempting to survive the quiet apocalypse of grief. Zhao weaves poetry from glances, textures, and silences, with lush period details serving as backdrop rather than focus. The film’s emotional impact lies in its simplicity—how it captures with aching clarity the hollowing that comes from burying a child and the impossible task of creating something beautiful in its wake. Buckley is the emotional anchor here, delivering a performance that vibrates with ancient sorrow and contemporary resonance. [Full review here]
7. TOGETHER
A squirm-inducing romantic horror about the literalization of codependency, Together pushes relationship drama into gooey, grotesque territory with a straight face and a knowing smirk. Dave Franco and Alison Brie are perfectly cast as a long-term couple whose move to the countryside triggers a slow dissolution of emotional boundaries, then physical ones, once a supernatural contaminant starts fusing them together, piece by fleshy piece. What begins as a breakup comedy quickly curdles into full Cronenberg, with limbs meshing, skin sticking, and power dynamics shifting like tectonic plates. Michael Shanks’ directorial debut feels both fresh and classically unnerving, with a clear sense of mood, pace, and tonal control. Beneath all the slime and body horror lies a pitch-black marital satire about emotional labor, sexual repression, and the masochism of staying together out of fear of being alone. [Full review here]
6. THE LIFE OF CHUCK
Mike Flanagan dials down the horror but keeps the haunt with The Life of Chuck, a surprisingly warm, often elegiac adaptation of a lesser-known Stephen King novella. Unfolding in a unique, chapter-like way, it’s a movie about the quiet, overlooked miracles of everyday life, and the emotional weight our smallest moments accumulate. Tom Hiddleston plays Chuck as a man so ordinary he’s nearly invisible, yet Flanagan treats his life like the epic it is, stitching together vignettes that reflect love, regret, and cosmic insignificance with soulful reverence. The film is a gamble structurally, but its design pays off in unexpected ways, building emotion from absence rather than excess. This is Flanagan at his most philosophical; still spooky, still melancholy, but shooting directly at the heart. [Full review here]
5. BUGONIA
Yorgos Lanthimos, ever the provocateur, returns to his sinister roots with Bugonia, a high-concept hostage thriller that asks whether paranoia is still paranoia if the system really is rigged. Jesse Plemons is spectacular as a psychologically fragile conspiracist who kidnaps a powerful corporate figure—played by a magnificently frosty Emma Stone—convinced she’s a literal alien. The setup is absurd, but the execution is disarmingly serious. Lanthimos laces this claustrophobic showdown with his trademark deadpan and surrealism, but also wields it as a scalpel to flay corporate speak, mental illness, and social dislocation. The result is simultaneously funny, sickening, and sad, a two-hander of dread where the only thing more terrifying than not being believed is being right. [Full review here]
4. MARTY SUPREME
Ping-pong has never looked this stressful. Josh Safdie’s first solo directorial effort after parting ways with brother Benny is a kinetic triumph, telling the story of a hustler who dreams of table tennis glory with the same sweaty energy that made Uncut Gems feel like a panic attack in cinematic form. Timothée Chalamet gives his best performance to date as Marty Mauser, a scheming, fast-talking, self-mythologizing Lower East Side legend with no filter, no brakes, and no plan B. The film is a relentless barrage of grifts, flings, scams, and paddles, all pulsing with tension, charisma, and moral rot. It’s a character study, a sports movie, and a tragedy disguised as a comedy, with just enough soul to make you root for Marty even as he careens toward self-destruction. [Full review here]
3. WEAPONS
Zach Cregger refuses to be pinned down with Weapons, a genre-straddling horror epic that shifts tone and form like a living creature. What starts as a quiet mystery about a missing classroom spirals into a kaleidoscopic fever dream that veers into fairytale, procedural, social satire, and body horror, often within the same reel. The ensemble cast is stacked (Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, and a truly unhinged Amy Madigan), but Cregger’s command of rhythm and mood is what impresses most. Weapons isn’t just scary; it’s scary smart, touching on gun violence, generational trauma, and the power of story with a sly grin and a twisted knife. In a horror landscape too often obsessed with trauma-for-trauma’s-sake, this one actually earns the mess. [Full review here]
2. SINNERS
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners feels like the kind of movie that justifies the entire concept of genre filmmaking. A Southern Gothic vampire epic soaked in blood, sweat, and soul, it centers on two twin brothers (Michael B. Jordan, twice) trying to build a juke joint haven in 1930s Mississippi. But the past never sleeps…and neither do the undead. Sinners is ambitious in the way most modern blockbusters fear to be: layered with racial subtext, brimming with historical detail, and staged with operatic grandeur. The music, composed by Ludwig Göransson, pulses through the film like lifeblood. Coogler weaves mythology and politics into a horror narrative with the kind of confidence that makes you question why Hollywood doesn’t let him do this more often. It’s thrilling, sad, sexy, and alive in every frame. [Full review here]
1. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
Paul Thomas Anderson gets modern and the result is one of the most vibrant, urgent, and darkly funny films of his career. One Battle After Another takes a sprawling, nearly three-hour journey through a fractured America—one where revolutionary factions have become performance art, right-wing militias operate from basement lairs, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s broken, washed-up radical is trying (and mostly failing) to parent his teenage daughter. The film weaponizes the absurdity of its characters without undercutting its emotional weight, making for hilarious scenes that are terrifying poignant. Sean Penn is scary and pathetic as a fascist-sympathizing colonel, while newcomer Chase Infiniti steals scenes as a kid born into chaos but determined not to repeat it. Another absolute banger from one of America’s greatest reigning auteur. [Full review here]
For other reviews, interviews, and featured articles, be sure to:
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Letterboxd
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter
Follow Silver Screen Riot on BlueSky
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Substack
The post Top Ten Films of 2025 appeared first on Silver Screen Riot.
