NÃO PERCA: Decider’s 17 Best Movies Of 2025 🍿
If you’re either unaware of or doing your best to ignore the impending sale of Warner Bros., we applaud you. The storied movie studio is coming off one of the single best years in its 102 year history — critically, commercially — but Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav has put the “For Sale” sign out on its proverbial front lawn. Ted Sarandos and his merry band of red envelopers at Netflix have come in with the “best” bid, promising all the while to preserve the studio’s legacy and commitment to big budget theatrical releases, but anyone who has been paying attention to what has happened to the output of 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox) after its sale to Disney back in 2019 knows beyond a shadow of doubt that once this deal goes through, things will get even more grim in Tinsel Town than they already are.
That being said, we’re not here today to weep for the future, we’re here to celebrate the present. After the first five fallow years of this decade, the result of COVID and two strikes that crippled the Hollywood machine, 2025 proved to be an outstanding year for cinema. We were blessed with new movies from esteemed masters like Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, James Cameron, Wes Anderson, Kelly Reichardt, Yorgos Lanthimos, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderbergh, Noah Baumbach, and Rick Linklater (not one but TWO gems from him!), in addition to witnessing the debuts of promising new voices like Eva Victor and Carson Lund. Whether you’ve been heading out to your local cineplex or staying home to enjoy a flick from the comfort of the couch, this year offered up a plentiful bounty of choices to make your movie nights memorable.
To that end, the team here at Decider gathered over the last few weeks to pull together what ultimately became this list of the Best 17 Movies of 2025 that you’re about to read. A few notes on process: We began by ranking our own individual Top 10 films of the year, a process that resulted in a short list of 45 different movies that at least one person felt worthy of inclusion on this list. We tallied these votes that came from a seven different Decider contributors and put them into one master list, which we then used as a jumping off point for a debate on the merits of these selections.
After some, shall we say, spirited conversation, we (eventually) arrived at was the following list of the year’s 17 best movies, which we’ll countdown in descending order until we reach the pinnacle of the medium that we remain enchanted by. You’ll find a broad mix of pictures included in this list — everything from weepy documentaries to side-splitting rom-coms to ambitious horror fare — that reflects the Decider team’s diverse interests and obsessions. Let us know how we did, and what you loved (and/or loathed) in the comments below!
DIRECTED BY: Mariska Hargitay
My Mom Jayne is as intimate as the title suggests, and then some. And Mariska Hargitay, as both filmmaker and key figure in the story, allows us access to the raw emotions and thorny soap operatics that are essential to our understanding of her mother, Jayne Mansfield. The film never feels like a TMI open-diary airing of scandal or navel-gazing self-pity, but rather an honest pursuit of the truth, no matter where it leads. Hargitay’s bravery and openness are such that the doc trumps any notion of self-indulgence and becomes much more than just warts-and-all biography; it’s an analysis of the complexities of fame and the cruel nature of show business, and gets down to the bare bones of the human condition, the contradictions and inconsistencies we all have. Jayne Mansfield may have been an extraordinary woman, but she was ultimately as happy and as troubled as most of us – albeit to greater extremes, as fostered by a highly scrutinized Hollywood career. —John Serba
WRITTEN BY: Akiva Schaffer, Doug Mand and Dan Gregor
DIRECTED BY: Akiva Schaffer
STARRING: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser
The world outside is grotesque scraggly-haired saggy balls right now, and this reboot of The Naked Gun is the escapist antidote to that nauseating reality. SNL/Lonely Island guy Akiva Schaffer reboots a long-dormant franchise (the first film from which Variety just dubbed the greatest movie comedy ever made!) with Neeson leading and a brilliantly game Anderson following, and the result is just as moronically puerile as we need it to be. The snowman bit, the unending coffee gags, a terrifyingly specific TiVo joke, all those chili dogs, naughty shadow puppets, self-aware fourth-wall-busting yuks, wheezy noir satire, the “P.L.O.T. Device” – this is all the stupidest shit ever and even if a bit doesn’t make you laugh, you shake your head at the mere thought that someone came up with a real mangy mongrel of a joke and stuck it in anyway because its chronic unjokiness is just really fucking funny. The hell with Eddington or One Battle After Another and all those capital-F Films out there that have something to say about the human condition and our profligate collective troubles – I’m convinced if we projected this dumbass random-ass dipshit-ass movie on the Moon and made the whole world watch it, we’d achieve world peace. — John Serba
WRITTEN BY: Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin
DIRECTED BY: Michael Angelo Covino
STARRING: Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Marvin, Covino
2025 was a solid year for rom-coms, but the year’s best may just be the one marketed as “an unromantic comedy.” Splitsville is heavy on the comedy, but never loses sight of romance. When Ashley (Arjona) asks Carey (Marvin) for a divorce, he runs to his best friend Paul and Paul’s wife Julie (Covino and Johnson) for support. Carey discovers that the secret to Paul and Julie’s happy marriage is an open marriage, and crosses a line that throws all of their lives into chaos. Splitsville is a modern take on the classic screwball comedy with fast-talking dialogue, farcical situations, and some of the best fight choreography you’ll see all year (plus, our main character is named Carey Grant, which has to be intentional, considering Cary Grant is one of the titans of screwball). In a year where love triangles seemed to dominate the rom-com space, Splitsville offers a fresh take with two married couples and modern relationship dynamics, where nothing is as simple as it seems on the surface – Angela Tricarico
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Wes Anderson
DIRECTED BY:
STARRING: Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton
The Phoenician Scheme isn’t the headiest, most ambitious Wes Anderson movie. (That would be last year’s Asteroid City.) It’s not even the funniest (The Royal Tenenbaums, maybe?), though it is very funny. What it does with such typically precise clarity is demonstrate the secret flexibility of Anderson’s supposedly fussy style. Yes, the story of wealthy (but possibly cash-poor) industrialist Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) and his nun-to-be-daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) scrambling to negotiate a series of funding deals for a labyrinthine infrastructure project somewhere in the Middle East has plenty of Anderson’s visual trademarks: presentational, oft-symmetrical framing of characters; precisely choreographed camera pans; hushed deliveries from a deadpan parade of his ever-growing ensemble. But it’s also full of experiments within that framework, playing with point-of-view, perspective, color schemes, and frequent overhead shots. For a fastidious nerd, he sure gets around – and directs a particularly wonderful performance from del Toro. His Korda seems to come to a gradual understanding that his moneyed scheming is a bizarre form of self-expression that he may not ultimately need, with greater love in his life. Would that every heedlessly ambitious rich guy could do the same.—Jesse Hassenger
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY:: Kelly Reichardt
STARRING: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, John Magaro, Gaby Hoffmann, Bill Camp
Josh O’Connor’s character in Kelly Reichardt’s latest is the exact opposite of the kind-hearted priest he plays in the new Knives Out, demonstrating just how versatile an actor he is. In this quiet, hilarious period piece, he stars as J.B. Mooney, an unemployed middle-class American who blows up his life to live out his fantasy of becoming a clever art thief. It won’t take you long to realize that the film’s title is a cheeky joke: A mastermind, this man is not. Reichardt goes behind deconstructing the ‘70s heist film with this one—she absolutely obliterates it. —Anna Menta
WRITTEN BY: Carson Lund, Nate Fisher, Michael Basta
DIRECTED BY: Carson Lund
STARS: Keith William Richards, Frederick Wiseman, Cliff Blake
This brilliantly funny and just as brilliantly philosophical baseball film is indebted to Richard Linklater’s sneaky-smart hangout comedies that inevitably become profound musings on the passage of time. Of course, you baseball wonks out there will whip out a well, actually and remind us that the game is the rare one that doesn’t function with a clock, and that’s absolutely the point, fellas. It’s the luscious core irony nestled in a story about a bunch of average guys – “plumbers and stuff” as one character describes them – playing the last game ever on a field that’s about to be bulldozed to build a school, and the last game ever for their shabby-but-beautiful beer-league teams of dudes who embody the profound spirit of the game. And this specific game never seems to want to end, extending deep into extra innings and the night itself as the guys playing it piss and moan about how they wish it would finally frickin’ end, even though deep down inside, they don’t want it to. There’s another irony for you. It’s funny how this game plays out, isn’t it? And funny how life plays out too. — John Serba
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster
STARRING: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal
It’s been five long years since the novel coronavirus first swept across our spacious skies and fruited plains, and if we’re being honest here, no one is exactly eager to revisit those dark nights of the American soul. No one, that is, except for Ari Aster, the exceptionally talented filmmaker who has made it his life’s mission to confront hard truths and repressed trauma in movies like Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, and now, Eddington. The movie takes its name from a fictional town in New Mexico where a conservative-leaning town sherriff (Joaquin Phoenix) locks horns with a liberal-leaning town mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s at once a scathing, hilarious, and altogether eerie look back at the period of time when the American way of life was (irreparably? permanently?) fractured, as well as a scarily prescient prognostication of what’s to become as we blindly enter the era of artificial intelligence.—Mark Graham
WRITTEN BY: Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer
DIRECTED BY: Noah Baumbach
STARRING: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup
Even Noah Baumbach would likely agree that it’s a little bit ironic that this moving elegy for a nearly bygone era when moviegoing audiences willingly and gleefully basked in the glow generated by the stars of the silver screen was financed by Netflix, the company that’s arguably most responsible for the (terminal?) decline of the theatrical movie experience. Put those dark realities aside for a minute, though, and instead focus on what Baumbach is able to wring out of both George Clooney (who plays the titular character), Adam Sandler (who plays the Jay Kelly’s put-upon and underappreciated manager), and especially Billy Crudup (who, if there was any justice in the world, would walk away with the 2026 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, an award that Adam Sandler himself could very easily end up winning).
Baumbach has long been one of the foremost chroniclers of the Gen X male experience, but now that he’s fully entrenched in his sixth decade of life, some of the caustic acidity that he once infused into pictures like Margot At The Wedding and Greenberg has been replaced here by touches of empathy and even regret. It’s almost as if he’s experiencing the dawning realization that the end — of movie stars, of Hollywood, and of life itself — is drawing ever closer, and we shouldn’t wait around until the proverbial house lights have come up to mourn, yes, but also celebrate how our generation found themselves unavoidably attracted to the gravitational pull of darkened movie palaces.—MDG
Bugonia (Focus Features)
WRITTEN BY: Will Tracy
DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos
STARRING: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis
Inside a black hole somewhere, deep in outer space, is probably where the comedy in Bugonia lives. It’s being crushed inside there, compressed into prickly, unsettling new comedy shapes. Shapes that maybe aren’t as funny. But we laugh louder and even more, because ha ha ha it’s us.
“That’s how they planned it,” says Teddy, Jesse Plemons’ frazzled conspiracist-kidnapper in Bugonia. “To make us the same as the bees. A dead colony, atomized in a trillion directions.” To Michelle (Emma Stone), the Big Pharma CEO he abducts and tortures because she’s a supposed alien in control of Earth, Teddy is a C-suite challenge to overcome. (“Can we have a dialogue about this?”) But he’s also a mirror on her company’s discount of human lives, and the sense that conspiracies, their fire whipped up by internet winds, are just how all of us drones try to make sense of a cruel, failing world. Bugonia is performance of 2025-level stuff from Stone – a completely shaved head is just where her all-in commitment starts – and Plemons plays mentally frayed with fearsome power.—Johnny Loftus
East Of Wall (Sony Pictures Classics)
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Kate Beecroft
STARRING: Tabatha Zimiga, Porshia Zimiga, Jennifer Ehle, Scoot McNairy
An unexpected delight to come out of the festival circuit, East of Wall redefines what it means to be a horse girl. Based on the real-lives of stars and mother-daughter duo, Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga, the Badlands-set drama follows the recently widowed Tabatha as she hustles to provide for her kids, her mother (an unrecognizable Jennifer Ehle), and the pack of unruly teens she has taken in. The family unit raises and sells horses in traditional (horse auctions) and untraditional (TikTok) ways, catching the eye of wealthy horse trader Roy (Scoot McNairy) who makes Tabatha an enticing offer. Written and directed by Kate Beecroft, East of Wall provides a stark and moving portrait of the struggles and freedom that come with living in the new America West. —Karen Kemmerle
Blue Moon (Sony Pictures Classics)
WRITTEN BY: Robert Kaplow
DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
STARRING: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
2025 was a great year for RIchard Linklater fans. We got not one, but two moving biographical dramas from the Oscar-nominated director this year (the second being Netflix’s Nouvelle Vague, about French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard). But my favorite was Blue Moon, starring a near-unrecognizable Ethan Hawke as Larry Hart, a lyricist known for his work with composer Richard Rodgers (played by a very restrained Andrew Scott). Blue Moon finds an attention-loving Hart putting on a brave face on the opening night of Oklahoma!—aka the night it went from “Rodgers and Hart” to “Rodgers and Hammerstein,” after Rodgers’ first collab with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein was a smash hit. It takes place over the course of one night in a single location—a bar—but Linklater’s keen sense of space keeps this from feeling like a filmed play. Instead, it’s a wonderful showcase for Hawke, who infuses his snappy dialogue with just the right amount of dry wit, rancor, and sorrow.—Anna Menta
WRITTEN BY: Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
DIRECTED BY: Clint Bentley
STARRING: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon, William H. Macy
No film made me cry harder this year than Train Dreams, released by Netflix after an Oscar-qualifying run in theaters. Star Joel Edgerton surely deserves a Best Actor nomination for his gut-wrenching performance as Robert Grainier, a man of few words, working in logging in the American West in the 1920s. Despite his introverted nature, Robert finds love (Felicity Jones) and starts a beautiful, simple life. But over the years, as the logging industry takes more and more trees from the earth, it takes more and more of Robert’s life from him, too. Neither of those resources are infinite. Directed by Clint Bentley, who adapted Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella with his co-writer Greg Kwedar, Train Dreams is a gorgeous, heartbreaking rumination on loss, life, and the beauty of it all.—Anna Menta
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Eva Victor
STARRING: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Kelly McCormack, Lucas Hedges, John Carroll Lynch
If you hadn’t heard of Sorry, Baby before Eva Victor’s surprise nomination for Best Actress at the 2026 Golden Globes, then you should run, not walk, to stream this brilliant little film on HBO Max. Victor—who wrote, directed, and starred in this film, making their feature debut, no less!—establishes themselves as one independent film’s next big voices with their smart, clever, and devastating character study of an English professor dealing with the fallout of sexual assault. Victor forgoes any trauma porn and instead focuses on the messy humanity of their protagonist. That includes awkward, funny moments right up alongside the pain. The result is refreshing, distinct, and above all else, real. —Anna Menta
WRITTEN BY: David Koepp
DIRECTED BY: Steven Soderbergh
STARRING: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Naomie Harris, Marisa Abela, Regé-Jean Page
Finally, a movie for grownups! Written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh, Black Bag is a clever spy thriller following brilliant counterintelligence agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassender) who is tasked with sussing out the identity of the traitor who leaked classified information. On the list of suspects is his wife, Kathryn Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett), an equally brilliant intelligence agent. With numerous twists and turns, Black Bag keeps audiences in suspense, thanks to cunning performances, smart dialogue, and a taut-94 minute runtime.—Karen Kemmerle
Sinners (Warner Bros. Pictures)
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Ryan Coogler
STARRING: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku
Sinners is, at its core, a vampire film, but you’ll quickly discover it’s so much more than that. It defies genre, mashing Southern Gothic elements with supernatural horror, 19th-century period details, and a strong musical thread throughout. Marking his fifth collaboration with director Ryan Coogler, Michael B. Jordan leads Sinners as identical twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore. It’s 1932. After serving in World War I and swindling criminal syndicates in Chicago, the twins return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi to open a juke joint for the local Black community, unaware that a supernatural evil is lurking right at their doorstep. Jordan’s dual performances are at the heart of the film, alongside Miles Caton, who, in his on-screen debut, carries Sinners’ standout scene in a way that makes you think he’s been doing this for years. In one word, Sinners is transcendent, and is just as thrilling of a viewing experience at home as it was in theaters. – Angela Tricarico
Weapons (Warner Bros. Pictures)
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Zach Cregger
STARRING: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
Josh Brolin bolts up in bed and bellows the mantra not of a troubled man or of a generation, but of Our Current Time in America: “What the FUCK!?!” Cregger followed up 2022’s wily horror outing Barbarian with something more difficult, ambitious, hilarious and psychologically excoriating, a story about a town’s collective grief when 17 schoolchildren, all from the same class, simultaneously run out the front doors of their homes to lord knows where. What ensues is a kaleidoscopic exploration of volatile ideas – addiction, school shootings, generational friction, isolation, infidelity, broken families and the omnipresent threat of violence, to name just a handful – funneled through a looping, multi-POV narrative, dynamic visual technique and Cregger’s restless refusal to adhere to a single genre or theme. And I’m happy and not sorry at all to report that that explosive ending ain’t leaving your head anytime soon, if ever. Weapons may be the funniest movie of the year at the same time it’s the scariest and the most provocative – and most terrifying of all is where you see yourself in it. — John Serba
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Paul Thomas Anderson
STARRING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benecio Del Toro
The consensus opinion of anyone who considers themselves a true movie lover is that Paul Thomas Anderson is the best living director without an Oscar on their shelf. Well, that seems quite likely to change come March 2026 when PTA’s new movie, One Battle After Another, seems poised to take home a slew of little gold men at the 98th annual Academy Awards. Hailed by many as an instant masterpiece upon its release, this wildly ambitious (and entertaining!) film is a spectacle without compare among 2025 releases.
Set in an unspecified time that feels at once highly contemporary yet also vaguely timeless, this picture tackles a cornucopia of topics: illegal immigration, shadowy billionaire secret societies, political violence, the use of extrajudicial force by rogue military forces, the effects of long-term substance abuse, the zen of martial arts, white supremacy, interracial relationships (and fetishes), and the calming sensation that comes from cracking and consuming a few small beers. At its core, though, this is a movie about parenting, and more specifically, the unbreakable bond between fathers and daughters — in this case, between retired revolutionary Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his teenager Willa (Chase Infiniti).
Part action movie, part political treatise, and entirely all-consuming, One Battle After Another proves itself to be a real movie lover’s movie, one that will activate all of your emotions and stimulate all your senses during the course of its 162 minute running time, each and every time you have the pleasure of watching it.—MDG
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