The movies of 2025.

Well, another year come and gone. Let's take a look back.

My favorite movies of 2025:

10. The Luckiest Man in America - As a devoted watcher during those oh-so-rare days off in grade school, it is impossible for me to be objective about “Press Your Luck”, so I appreciated this look at one of its darkest chapters, fueled by a typically strong Paul Walter Hauser performance as the wily Michael Larson.

9. Play Dirty - It is unfortunate that this movie ended up lost in the wilds of streaming and purists of Richard Stark’s work will certainly find fault, but I found this a fun mix of Stark’s sensibilities and those of writer/director Shane Black.

8. Elio - I'll be the first to admit that Pixar’s latest isn’t quite up there with the studio’s masterpieces, but it is colorfully designed and incredibly charming.

7. Zootopia 2 - There were just as many fun moments in this sequel, but the stronger handle on its messaging made all the difference.

6. KPOP Demon Hunters - Animated feature is bursting with energy, eye-popping animation and catchy songs, making for one of the year’s most pleasant surprises.

5. Highest 2 Lowest - It’s an audacious thing to remake an Akira Kurosawa movie, but Spike Lee succeeds as a number of others have with this wonderfully tense and flavorful remake.

4. Mickey 17 - The world building in this Bong Joon-ho joint is off the charts and the performances from Robert Pattinson and Mark Ruffalo are sensational.

3. Dog Man - Perhaps the year’s most purely entertaining animated movie; a goofy and sweet treat for the young and the young-at-heart.

2. Marty Supreme - By all rights, the main character should be someone you want only the worst for, but in the hands of Timothée Chalamet, you find yourself rooting for him in this most unusual underdog sports movie.

1. Sinners - Even before the vampires hit the scene, this movie is rich in Southern atmosphere and powerful characterizations.

Runners-up:

The Bad Guys 2

Black Phone 2

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

John Candy: I Like Me

The Naked Gun

Now You See Me: Now You Don't

Paddington in Peru

Predator: Killer of Killers

The Running Man

Weapons

Underrated:

The Amateur, M3GAN 2.0, The Roses

Overrated:

Black Bag, Caught Stealing, Predator: Badlands

Streaming exclusives that should've been released in theaters:

Heads of State, John Candy: I Like Me, Play Dirty

Theatrical movies that should've been sent to streaming:

In the Lost Lands, Lilo and Stitch

My favorite things in movies - 2025:

the arresting Petey montage in Dog Man

Charlie's analysis in The Amateur

the courting ritual in Jurassic World: Rebirth

the creation waltz in Frankenstein

the crew peruses the videos in The Luckiest Man in America

“Did you get all that?” - The Naked Gun

the dinner prayer/musical number in Mickey 17

Eli and Patrick hit the dance floor in Companion

the final chase in Weapons

the friendship montage in Elio

Grofield tracks the bad guys to their hideout in Play Dirty

the history of Hunter's family in Paddington in Peru

“It's a killing floor.” - Sinners

the job interview montage in The Bad Guys 2

“Joint signing!” - KPOP Demon Hunters

the knife throw in G20

the lawyers pay Kikuo a visit in Rental Family

“Long story.” - Heads of State

Michael Cera in The Running Man and especially The Phoenician Scheme

Monsignor Wicks' confession in Wake Up, Dead Man

the Powerhouse montage in The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

“Push forward.” - Hell of a Summer

the rap battle in Highest 2 Lowest

the second appearance of the Biscuit Bandit in One of Them Days

the show-off round robin in Now You See Me: Now You Don't

the taming montage in How to Train Your Dragon

the three-way phone call in Black Phone 2

the wanted poster in The Running Man

Random thoughts:

- Clown in a Cornfield. Just...Clown in a mothertruckin' Cornfield. Surprisingly, this was not based on an original screenplay, but a series of novels. Given that Pennywise was back in the pop culture consciousness due to the HBO show “Welcome to Derry”, it’s quite likely that the production team didn’t want to go with a supernatural angle for their nemesis, Frendo the clown, even though a supernatural angle would’ve been far preferable to what this project ended up going with. As it turned out, Frendo was played by a number of citizens of the small town its main characters moved to. (And that sound you hear is Stephen King handing off the “Hello, lawsuit!” baton to Edgar Wright.) The big difference here is that unlike the Sandford residents of Hot Fuzz, who seemed quite polite and normal before their true colors came out, the sheriff, the waitress and the schoolteacher were so obnoxious from the first moment of their respective introductions, it would’ve been stupid to suspect that they weren’t somehow involved in this…and to deepen the connections to Hot Fuzz even further, the parents of the teenagers who got killed throughout the story were just completely fine with this whole situation? We never met the parents of the victims, but did they really believe their teenagers to be so obnoxious that they deserved to be killed by their neighbors dressed up as clowns? The dynamics in those parent/child relationships would’ve been far more interesting than anything this movie farted out. This was made by the guy who did Tucker & Dale vs. Evil and it’s more than likely not by choice that his movies have had six to seven-year gaps between them, but if this is really the best he could do, maybe we could do with another seven years before he puts out a new movie.

- The Life of Chuck. It's been long enough. That first (...third?) segment was basically Identity, right? Someone else has to have noticed.

- Like a whole bunch of people, I went to see Superman and…I have thoughts. The casting was good and it had some exciting action scenes, but I really need to talk about that 800-pound gorilla known as the video from Superman’s parents. Lex Luthor just happened to find it in the Fortress of Solitude and apparently had it verified by Kryptonian linguists that Jor-El and Lara wanted Kal-El to take a harem and dominate the people of Earth. Now Lex is - I would absolutely imagine in-universe - a known Superman hater and, even if in this incarnation he somehow wasn’t, there was a tone of disdain towards Supes that he did absolutely nothing to hide, so as far as I’m concerned, there was no reason whatsoever to suspect that, in terms of the Kryptonian message, Lex wasn’t…okay. What is that expression I’m trying to think of here? Oh yeah…fucking goddamn lying. Honestly, what purpose did it serve to have that message be 100% legitimate? Pretty lucky thing on Lex’s part, wouldn’t you say? If it was supposed to be a bit of metaphor on the part of James Gunn, it had to be the clumsiest cinematic metaphor since High Noon. (People far more educated than myself will explain this better. Google is your friend, after all.) But maybe, I better stop here ‘cause I’m starting to sound like that doorknob that wrote that “Rick and Morty” episode. You can tell he was a total Snyderbro, so to end this entry on a lighter note: you know the scene where Hawkgirl dropped the psychotic dictator from the sky? Yeah, we need more women like that.

- The year in PG-13 f-bombs: Rental Family, Wake Up, Dead Man and, my personal favorite, M3GAN 2.0.

- And here, I thought that it was horror movie scores that sucked these days. Well, they do, but Christ’s sake, look what their composers have to work with! I’ve spoken my piece about Clown in a Cornfield (because that much bullshit had to merit its own entry), so let me devote a few words each to Vicious (A spooky first half gave way to a sleep-inducing, second half touched off by a sequence that hearkened back to all the other one-named Saw knockoffs from 20 years hence. The yearly ‘waste Dakota Fanning‘s talent on a horror writer/director’s bullshit’ experiment continues apace.), The Woman in the Yard (Between the should’ve-been-a-short-film, plot, the unlikable children, and the confusing climax, I’m really hoping that Liam Neeson hasn’t lost Jaume Collet-Serra‘s number.), Him (A series of arresting images on a desperate and ultimately futile search for a narrative strong enough to support them. After losing out on Weapons, I can completely understand Jordan Peele wanting to put feet up asses.) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (I liked it more than most, but the moron that stood in the middle of the road - thus engineering the accident that fucked up everybody’s lives - could not have been killed quickly enough).

- There seemed to be a lot of sticks up asses vis-a-vis Honey, Don't!. Granted, as a mystery, it was pretty shaggy (will Honey catch the shady French chick or was she just gonna be another bang?), but as a hangout movie, it was generally entertaining. The banter between Margaret Qualley and Charlie Day was especially enjoyable. Chalk another one up for the ‘yes, I want to see an original movie, but only if it’s an original movie specifically catered to my arcane tastes!’ category. 

- For a while, I was really grooving on Caught Stealing. In spite of the main character’s backstory, the film seemed significantly lighter than a lot of Darren Aronofsky’s usual fare…then came the moment where Austin Butler’s Hank found that the bad guys killed Zoe Kravitz’s Yvonne, and this plot turn cast such a dark cloud over the rest of the movie, I found it impossible to enjoy anything that followed. Honestly, he may as well have found her in a refrigerator.

- I had a really nice time with Elio in spite of it apparently being compromised from its original form. I’m not letting the original form of this movie where Elio was gay bother me because if I reviewed every single movie based on what it originally was supposed to be, I’m not gonna enjoy very much. (Though I was fascinated to learn that America Ferrera was the original voice of Elio’s relative - his aunt in the finished movie, his mom in the development stage - because the character was designed to look exactly like her.) However, the thing that will stick with me the most is me going to the theater, seeing the movie and hearing it raining outside, only to find that I stupidly left my windows down, completely soaking the inside of my front seat.

- I want to see an early screening of Jurassic World: Rebirth. I enjoyed the action scenes, and the effects were as impressive as ever, but I found the character work was way too transparent (how beneficial for one scene to point out the two characters I’m supposed to like the least) and the subplot featuring the Latino family seemed like it was an appendage from an earlier draft that nobody bothered to amputate.

- Love Hurts...and so did this movie. Zing! Yeah, I'm sorry. I can do better than that. Ke Huy Quan‘s first starring vehicle (as realtor Marvin) following his surprise Oscar win started off decently enough with some fun fight scenes and the rather welcome - if too brief - appearance from fellow Goonie Sean Astin as Marvin‘s boss, Cliff. But then, the rather dull John Wick-inspired plot had to get in the way, compounded by the unpleasant killing off of Astin’s character, the only other person in this thing that was even slightly likable. The film sank further and further with a mixture of hard-edged violence and unbridled quirk as appetizing as that of orange juice and toothpaste. (BTW, Gretchen, stop trying to make Marshawn Lynch's acting career happen. It's not gonna happen!) And then, there was the forced-as-hell romance between Marvin and Ariana DeBose's thoroughly insufferable Rose (Sidebar: as unfortunate as DeBose's post-Oscar run has been, I cannot agree with people calling it the worst one of all time. I mean, have people seriously forgotten that Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a thing?). But then again, this helped the title attain truth in advertising: with a relationship as rancid as the one at the film’s center, love absolutely did hurt. Sorry. It couldn’t be helped.

- Ever since I saw the trailer, I was back-and-forth on whether or not I wanted to see The Housemaid, especially since I forcibly ejected myself from the Paul Feig business after Another Simple Favor*, but this turned out to be significantly better than I expected. This film’s brand of crazy was far more appealing to me than the earlier movie’s was and it’s good to see that this film was a box office success, because I’m working on a couple of scripts like this myself.

- If I had a nickel for every Die Hard knockoff that came out in the past year with a female lead, I'd have three nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's damned peculiar that it happened thrice.

- Moreover, if I had a dollar for every movie this year that featured an actor playing two different characters…I could finance a movie of my own. Seriously, there were a ton of them.

- Tron: Ares barely edged out Anaconda as this year‘s ‘who in the hell asked for this?’ project. I wasn’t terribly interested in the previous Tron movies, but this one in particular made me say on several occasions, “There could be a ten-minute scene of Sydney Sweeney doing naked jumping jacks and I’d still be saying to myself, ‘you know, I’m really not sure if I wanna see this’.”

- I’m not sure what annoyed me more about the otherwise entertaining Thunderbolts*: the fact that Marvel and the marketing department pretty much gave a giant ‘fuck you!’ to anyone who didn't see the film opening weekend and just gave away the point of the asterisk in the title or that the corrupt politician responsible for all the shit that happens in the movie gets off scot free...though you can't help but love that the Russian whispers to her, “We own you now.”

* - It has been rumored that Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively take it upon themselves to liven up each other’s recent movie projects. By all the names of God, I never wanna find out what Reynolds added to this movie because it’s just gonna make me mad.