Five and Five from 2025

Five Favorite Films and Favorite First Watches from 2025.

2025 has been a weird year at the movies.

I’ve seen my usual pack of 60 or so films in theaters and around 100 or so at home. When I look back at the past year, I find myself more than a little underwhelmed by the theatrical output. Sure, films like Sinners lit up the box office in a way that gave me heart amidst the numerous failures and flops. But I can’t deny that it’s rare for two films I saw in the February/March corridor to still be standing at the top of my year-end list. Part of me wants to attribute it purely to the quality of those films (for which there is some element), but another part of me believes that 2025 was simply a down year for film. Rare was the film that captured my heart as much as my imagination.

Even if 2025 didn’t set my world on fire cinematically, it still produced plenty of gems not mentioned here. As I do every year, the full lists of 2025 Favorites and my 2025 First Watches are available on my Letterboxd. I’ve made a concerted effort to get away from ranking things in the past few years. The ten films I’ve included here are simply ten that have especially stuck with me over the past year for one reason or another.

Please note that, as is the case every year, there are still some 2025 films I haven’t gotten to/won’t get to in time for this list. This includes: Marty Supreme, It Was Just an Accident, Peter Hujar’s Day, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Rental Family, and several others I’m sure I’m forgetting to mention.

So without further ado, here’s my Five and Five from 2025:

One Battle After Another - Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

OBAA is almost certainly the movie of the year. It’s timely , it’s well made, it’s packed with ideas. As I’ve said previously: Paul Thomas Anderson has always been our most American filmmaker. Call it the Robert Altman in him, but he’s always been willing to look directly at the mess of contradictions that make up our history of snake oil salesmen, strivers, and found families. In OBAA, he manages to fuse all of these these into a commentary on the way that our history has poisoned us and continues to poison us to this day- even as we hope that our children may some day be able to outrun our mistakes.

Eephus - Dir. Carson Lund

I’ve been raving about Carson Lund’s rec league baseball odyssey for months now. Centering on the final game of a men’s baseball team before their field is to be replaced with a new school, Lund demonstrates a talent for detailed, patient storytelling. Major League by way of Tsai Ming-liang (and Goodbye Dragon Inn in particular), the film becomes a study in the camaraderie of these men striving to give mediocrity one last shot. Pro tip: If you watch it at home, be sure to watch with headphones. The sound design is absolutely sublime.

Black Bag - Dir. Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh has never had bad sex in his entire life and this film is proof of that. Following a spy assigned to investigate a list of suspected traitors (one of whom is his wife), Soderbergh turns in a classic. Sleek, sexy, and deeply controlled, with a bubbling tension beneath every moment, Soderbergh is reminds us all why he is the modern master of the adult drama.

Roofman - Dir. Derek Cianfrance

I was lukewarm on even seeing Roofman until I started hearing the positive notices. I’m happy to report that those notices are accurate. Like me, you might not have pegged the guy who made Blue Valentine to be capable of a Linklater-style hangout movie. But that’s largely the gear the film operates in. By the time it shifts back into the drama, I was so invested that knowing the ending (the film is based on a true story) felt like a double impact of bricks.

Splitsville - Dir. Michael Angelo Covino

While I still think The Naked Gun reboot is the best comedy of the year, Splitsville comes verrrry close to knocking it off in my opinion. Michael Angelo Convino’s zany rom-com is frequently hilarious (including one of the best gags of the year involving a roller coaster and an arm full of bagged up goldfish) but also boasts some of the best camerawork I’ve seen in a movie all year. It is an incredibly precise film with specific camera and actor blocking throughout, as well as layered performances from all of the leads. If I do have a knock, it’s that the film (like most films these days) is probably 20 minutes too long. But this is a small gripe! It’s not the joke machine that The Naked Gun is, but it’s equally funny in its own right.

Five Favorite First Watches in 2025

Blue (1993) - Dir. Derek Jarman

A late entry to this list. Blue is exactly what it says it is: 78 minutes of unbroken blue screen paired with a lush soundscape. Still, it feels almost unfair to solely define the soundscape of the film under these terms. Blue is Jarman’s final statement, made as his health was failing due to AIDS-related complications. This included partial blindness that left him only able to see in shades of blue. The film does not solely dwell on this fact, instead becoming a tapestry of experience and feeling. Jarman is righteously angry at his circumstances (and their political consequences), yes, but he also is still human. What stunned me was not so much the depth of his pain but rather the deepening of his humanity amidst his troubles. He remains wistful, romantic, sweet, ironic, bitter. He remains himself even in the face of his end. A shattering, magnificent masterwork.

A Fish in the Bathtub (1998) - Dir. Joan Micklin Silver

Joan Micklin Silver’s films always feel like a warm hug from a friend during a bracing winter storm. Even when her films are unforgiving of their (often prickly) protagonists, they manage to hold on to some semblance of belief in the people surrounding them. A Fish in the Bathtub is no different. Criminally underseen, the film centers on a a couple whose 40-year marriage threatens to unravel when the husband brings home a full sized trout he demands to keep in the bathtub. Played by real life married couple/comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Stiller plays the textbook definition of a mean old bastard to Meara’s long-suffering wife. A young Mark Ruffalo plays their son struggling to get his father to apologize for his obstinance while juggling his own marital crisis. While this may all sound like weighty territory to navigate (titular fish aside), Silver displays her typically deft touch on the material, finding the heart and humor in the face of emotional distress.

Bamboozled (2000) - Dir. Spike Lee

Few filmmakers are as willing to engage with thorny questions that lack clear answers as Spike Lee. Bamboozled is his Network, and like every Spike joint, it’s the craziest mashup of ideas, tones, and performances ever to bludgeon a screen. Vicious, contemptuous, and bitingly hilarious, the film uses the premise of a flailing TV writer pitching a 21st-century minstrel show as a vessel for exploring what it means to be a black person in an industry (and country) that has shown you nothing but contempt for most of its existence. It’s an incredible, singular work, and features maybe the single best use case for early-digital filmmaking.

Breaking News (2004) - Dir. Johnny To

Where most of the films on this list tend to be more thoughtful and mildly paced, Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To’s Breaking News absolutely fucking bangs. It’s blockbuster craft at the absolute highest level. Following a failure to stop a gang of robbers, the film zeroes in on the conflict between the robbers and police as the latter attempts to redeem themselves in real time through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts. It’s a searing critique of the media and police state, wrapped up in a series of twists and turns, smooth criminals, and cat-and-mouse antics. Not to mention an all time banger of an ending.

Birth (2004) - Dir. Jonathan Glazer

On its face, Birth is a film that is tremendously easy to ascribe concerning motivations to. A young boy shows up at newly-engaged Nicole Kidman’s doorstep ten years after the death of her first husband claiming to be her husband reincarnated. Kidman, still sick with grief about her first husband’s sudden demise, gradually becomes more and more convinced of this and considers ripping apart her life entirely in pursuit of the unthinkable.

Yet what the film is after, to paraphrase Bright Wall / Dark Room’s Veronica Fitzpatrick, is less a story that is disturbing or pedophiliac in nature. It’s a film about a woman whose soul is so thoroughly drenched in grief that she will risk anything and ruin everything if it means she will see her late husband again. It’s not about whether this young boy is him. It’s about how much she wishes he were. There are plenty of stories out there about the long tail of grief, but few that manage to capture its never-ending, often self-destructive nature so effectively.