The 10 Movies that Mattered Most in 2025

By Laurence Lerman / New York City

SCREEN TIME

The year 2025 will be remembered as the kind of cinematic annum that almost never happens anymore—one where the conversation wasn’t driven by IP or franchise bloat, but by filmmakers with something electric on their minds. It was a year in which two horror films crashed the best-of lists, a rarity in any era, and where a remarkable spread of auteurs—from newcomers sharpening their blades to veterans pushing themselves into riskier terrain—delivered a wide variety of work that felt bracingly alive. The result was an impressive slate of films unified only by their ambition, artistry, and refusal to play it safe.

Here are 10 of them, in no particular order, that really worked for me:

---

One Battle After Another

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Writer/director Anderson’s masterful latest work reimagines revolutionary fiction as kinetic, black-humored action. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a former insurgent drawn back into conflict when a corrupt officer (Sean Penn) hunts him and his daughter (newcomer Chase Infiniti) across a fractured America. With magnetic support from Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, and Regina Halli, Anderson, shooting in the glorious widescreen VistaVision format blends anarchic set pieces with emotional stakes, making this both a political rumble and a surprisingly intimate father-daughter drama.

---

Sinners

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Genre-bending Sinners blends period drama, gothic horror, and social commentary. Coogler’s go-to leading man Michael B. Jordan—the De Niro to Coogler’s Scorsese—gives a tour-de-force dual performance as twin brothers Smoke and Stack in 1932 Mississippi who set out to open a juke joint — until a malevolent vampiric force upends their plans. With Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo adding rich texture, the film feels like mythic American folklore updated with eerie dread.

---

A House of Dynamite

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Return after an eight-year hiatus, Bigelow fires on all cylinders with this 21^st century nuclear thriller that unfolds in near real time and feels wired to explode. A House of Dynamite places viewers in the tense cockpit of national crisis: an unidentified ballistic missile has been launched toward the U.S., and government and military officials have only minutes to react. The ensemble is led by Idris Elba as the U.S. president and Rebecca Ferguson as a top communications officer, alongside strong supporting players Jared Harris and Tracy LettsAll of them find themselves engaged in personal and political decision-making on the brink of possible extinction.

---

Eddington

Directed by Ari Aster 

Featuring fine work from stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, Aster’s ambitious work veers from the straight-on horror parameters of his earlier films and delivers a sprawling, strange and horrifying satire. Set amidst a pandemic-era America roiling with conspiracies and technological fear, the story follows a New Mexico community spinning into suspicion and paranoia as fringe theories metastasize into real danger. The film’s narrative pulls at the fault lines of trust and terror, mapping how misinformation and social fracture can feel as frightening as any supernatural threat.

---

Nouvelle Vague

Directed by Richard Linklater 

This exuberant and affectionate plunge into the birth of cinema’s French New Wave follows a young Jean-Luc Godard as he scrambles to make his rules-shattering 1960 film Breathless with a crew of hungry collaborators and almost no money. Linklater captures the chaotic ingenuity of the “nouvelle vague” movement as it shattered all the rules, began crafting new ones, and rewrote narrative film grammar. Energetic and playful and presented in French with English subtitles (oui! oui!), it’s a valentine to creative rebellion and the messy thrill of artistic reinvention. And Zoey Deutch shines as Godard’s hesitant leading lady Jean Seberg.

---

Sentimental Value

Directed by Joachim Trier

Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve star in Danish-Norwegian powerhouse Trier’s tender but powerful family drama about reconciliation through art. After their mother’s death, estranged sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) face the return of their filmmaker father, Gustav (Skarsgård), who casts Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) in his comeback project about his family after Nora, an actress, refuses. Old wounds and unresolved affections quickly rise to the surface with the meta-film project becoming part of their emotional reckoning.

---

An Officer and a Spy

Directed by Roman Polanski

An Officer and a Spy finally reached U.S. audiences this year after its 2019 Venice premiere, and it was clearly worth the wait. Polanski’s meticulous historical thriller dramatizes France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair through the eyes of the principled officer who risked everything to expose a conspiracy against an innocent man. Anchored by a compelling performance from Jean Dujardin, the film unfolds like a procedural moral tragedy, resonating with present-day anxieties about truth, power, and institutional betrayal.

---

Hamnet

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Chloé Zhao’s moving adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed 2020 novel stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal as Agnes and William Shakespeare, whose tender marriage fractures after the tragic death of their son Hamnet to the plague. With fine supporting turns from Emily Watson and Joe Alwyn, Zhao’s lyrical storytelling (from a script she co-wrote with O’Farrell) transforms grief into a universal meditation on love, loss, and the artistic impulse that springs from deep sorrow.

---

Weapons

Directed by Zach Cregger

Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens when 17 children from a third-grade class slip out of their homes at 2:17 a.m. and vanish, a nightmare that rips through their small town of Maybrook, USA. Julia Garner’s shell-shocked teacher, Josh Brolin’s enraged father, and Alden Ehrenreich’s conflicted cop anchor intersecting stories of blame, grief, and supernatural dread in the form of…witchcraft, perhaps? Rising tensions, violent interludes and a dose of jump scares elevate this one into an unsettling, unpredictable, and fiercely original horror entry.

---

Misericordia

Directed Alain Guiraudie

From France, Guiraudie’s darkly comic thriller follows a man who returns to his rural hometown for a funeral and is quickly drawn into a tangle of flirtations, suspicions, and half-spoken desires. The film moves with a languid but palpable erotic charge of what might be best described as “queer noir”—where every gesture feels like a clue and an invitation. Guiraudie’s blend of mystery, humor, and yearning turns this small town into a seductive maze of motives and longing.

---

Laurence Lerman is a film journalis and a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.