“What makes a film good?” is an age-old question to keep film school kids and aspiring theorists up at night, but also the most uproarious pastime for us lucky enough to be squabbling over annual “best of” lists. Thankfully, unlike some recent seasons, 2025 gave the PopMatters critics’ team plenty to chew on as we considered what could be narrowed down to Best Films. This season saw more powerhouse performances and bold ideas than one could memorize, as well as surprisingly many off-kilter, genre-defying releases. Admittedly, some baffled us so much we didn’t know what to do with them, at least in terms of recommending them to a general audience.
Words were exchanged, and opinions flew all over the place. Ultimately, everyone agreed that this year, a “good” film is an interesting one, a fresh idea, or at least a fresh take on a tired one. Seen from this angle, 2025 was one of the best years for film in a long while. The visceral, the absurd, and the morbid all take their rightful place in our eclectic compilation.
Nearly half of these included on our Best Films list come from non-English-speaking productions in what is shaping up to be the most successful year for “world” cinema on the global awards circuit. The rest stem from a variety of budgets and backgrounds, with directors ranging from hopeful newcomers and indie darlings to household names you can’t live without.
Enjoy a read through our list of the most interesting films, aka, “Best Films” of 2025, watch the trailers provided, and find something fresh to pique your curiosity. If you are a film buff and see one of your favorites omitted, please take no offense; in the words of the hurried executive from Park Chan-wook’s latest masterpiece, we had no other choice. – Ana Yorke
2000 Meters to Andriivka – Director: Mstyslav Chernov (PBS: Frontline)
The 2023 documentary by Mstyslav Chernov, 20 Days in Mariupol, is a stark tale of Ukrainians’ dogged resilience in the face of a savage and unprovoked Russian invasion. His latest, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, is a similarly riveting story of what it looks like when a besieged nation goes on the counteroffensive.
Embedding with a Ukrainian infantry platoon as they mount an assault on the Russian-held village of Andriivka during the 2023 offensive, Chernov captures the day-to-day, inch-by-inch nature of a 21st-century war that – except for the drones and body cams – resembles the Western Front in World War I. The soldiers’ task is daunting: Moving through a narrow strip of “forest” (most of the trees blown to splinters long ago) between vast expanses of mined ground pocked by shell holes, using grenades and kamikaze drones to blast the Russian defenders out of their defenses.
The grindingly slow assault is the kind of advance where men die for inches of ground. Yet despite the potential for futility—the men know that by the time they reach the ruins of Andriivka, it will only be an idea of a place—in a war where victory seems defined less by winning than avoiding defeat, the film’s subjects do not seem to lose their spirit. Ruins can be rebuilt. – Chris Barsanti
Black Bag – Director: Steven Soderbergh (Focus Features)
Steven Soderbergh’s work after his non-retirement has been a boon to cinema, filled with nifty and fast-paced genre pieces that would have warmed the heart of a smart Golden Age studio boss who liked profits and professionalism. Yet it feels like it has been a minute since he produced anything more substantive.
Black Bag is a sleek, stealthy piece of work about a British spy (Michael Fassbender) tasked with uncovering a leaker who may, in fact, be his wife (Cate Blanchett), also a spy. Fast-paced and deftly scripted by David Koepp, the thriller elements have a quiet, unfussy velocity that generates physical suspense, even as the heart of the piece is personal. (Unlike many filmmakers who dabble in espionage stories, Soderbergh is not overly enamored of technical wizardry.)
The real suspense lies in the unknowability of the closest friends or family, culminating in a dinner party where several very civilized spies feel each other out over wine and subtext-laden dialogue as danger hangs heavy in the air. Black Bag is a crackerjack spy flick that doubles as a compelling relationship drama. – Chris Barsanti
Blue Moon – Director: Richard Linklater (Sony Pictures)
Richard Linklater has two films out this year. That fact alone doesn’t attest to the filmmaker’s brilliance. However, both are stellar in completely different ways, as is most of his oeuvre, and those facts do make a strong case for declaring his talent as seemingly omnipotent.
The eclectic director is an American treasure; his films are vast and varied, and his signature style is often nuanced to the point of elusiveness. For example, the main thing that Blue Moon has in common with the other Linklater film this year (Nouvelle Vague) is that both pay tribute to influential artists from the early and mid-1900s. Otherwise, the films could not be more divergent in style, atmosphere, and characterization.
You don’t have to be a fan of musicals to become fully absorbed in Blue Moon. It might help, but in my view, you don’t even need to know about songwriter Lorenz Hart’s tragic fall from grace to appreciate the story itself. The way Ethan Hawke, a long-term Linklater collaborator, brings to life the lyricist whose trajectory was marred by alcoholism is captivating.
Shot mainly in one room (recalling the lesser-known Linklater vehicle, 2001’s Tape), this would portend a claustrophobic atmosphere. Yet somehow, all the activity in the bar-restaurant setting obliterates an oppressive feeling, allowing Blue Moon to transcend time and place.
Hawke’s portrayal of the loquacious, self-centered Hart, as he grapples with the opening of “Oklahoma“, written by his former colleague Richard Rodgers and Rodgers’ new songwriting partner, Oscar Hammerstein, is endearingly empathetic, by turns funny and sad. Margaret Qualley as Hart’s unrequited love interest, Elizabeth Weiland, also gives a standout performance.
With a cast rounded out by Andrew Scott and Bobby Cannavale, and a script inspired by letters between Hart and Weiland, Blue Moon enshrines Hart’s legacy in a thoroughly engrossing way for musical theater acolytes and neophytes alike. – Alison Ross
Caught Stealing – Director: Darren Aronofsky (Sony Pictures)
Let epic fools unite! Well, that’s a phrase of PopMatters‘ Ana Yorke to describe Austin Butler and Matt Smith’s performances in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing — complimentary, of course. It’s difficult to disagree with her because Caught Stealing is a deliriously silly film in the best sense of the word, and moments of silliness are in ample supply.
Smith’s introductory scene should be marvelled at for his nuanced verbal delivery and physical mannerisms — comedy gold. Then there’s Butler and Zoë Kravitz’s striptease race, the Hasidic Drucker brothers driving around in a 1980s-era Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, and Russian mobster Alexsei’s (Yuri Kolokolnikov) one-of-a-kind verbal and physical wit. Not to forget, Caught Stealing boasts one of the most fun credit sequences in a long time. All that said, the film’s beating heart is Kravitz’s performance as Yvonne, the girlfriend of once aspiring major league baseball player Hank (Butler). Without Yvonne, who appears in only a handful of scenes, the film is thematically or emotionally incomplete.
Caught Stealing is a nostalgic treat for anyone with an affection for 1990s cinema, and it returns Aronofsky to the decade that made him a name with his debut feature, Pi (1998). That said, it never feels like a pastiche of the 1990s, nor does it feel like it belongs to the present. In a strange way, it’s lost in the folds or creases of time. This all adds up to Caught Stealing being one of the year’s most intriguing films. It’s plucky and tough, elevating itself above what it should have been: average, forgettable fun. Someone forgot to tell the filmmakers that. – Paul Risker
Checkpoint Zoo – Director: Joshua Zeman (Osmosis Global)
At least the animals had time to pack when God flooded the world. That was not the case when missile shells fell on Feldman Ecopark, a roughly 350-acre landscape park containing more than 5,000 animals, and the setting of the touching yet tense documentary film, Checkpoint Zoo. Located in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, just 30 kilometers from the Russian border, Ecopark became an almost literal monkey in the middle of the two nations’ fiery exchanges.
The human-animal bond is beautifully showcased throughout Checkpoint Zero, with man and beast meeting each other in the middle. It’s heartwarming, often funny, and fairly mesmerizing. We understand why these people are risking their lives, even if braving missiles to save some sloths may seem silly to others. “There are smart decisions, and there are right decisions,” says one worker.
Sadly, the flooding of Russian aggression has lasted far more than 40 days and nights, with no dove in sight. It’s unclear where things will go from here, but Checkpoint Zero has a timeless quality to it which almost surpasses the Russo-Ukrainian War in particular; the bond between our species.
See also: “‘Checkpoint Zoo’ Saves the Animals Two by Two“, by Matt Mahler
Die, My Love – Director: Lynne Ramsay (MUBI)
If there’s one word to describe Lynne Ramsay’s films, it would be visceral, and Die, My Love, adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, impeccably fits Ramsay’s mold of psychological turmoil. A meditative horror of sorts that slowly parses the unraveling of a suffering first-time mother, it is a difficult watch. Still, it offers deep understanding and empathy for its tortured protagonist, making it one of the rare films everyone should see.
Die, My Love’s pedigree is a spectacle in itself. Legend has it that Martin Scorsese read the novel with his book club, envisioning Jennifer Lawrence in the main role. He then sent the book to Lawrence’s production company, Excellent Cadaver, and Lawrence, thrilled by the challenging material, forwarded it to Ramsay, who set out to write the screenplay with the famed Irish playwright Enda Walsh. Finally, over a casual chat, Lawrence pitched Robert Pattinson to play her husband, and how could Hollywood’s superstar weirdo par excellence say no?
Turns out the pairings were a triumph. Die, My Love is a powerhouse narrative of depression, marital issues, and the very female troubles tied to raising a family. Grace (Lawrence) and Jackson (Pattinson), a young couple wildly in love, move from New York to Montana to save money, after Jackson inherits a dilapidated house from his late uncle. The house, rural and in shoddy condition, might actually prove a solid backdrop for Grace, an aspiring writer, to pen her breakout piece, but she soon gets pregnant and everything – including her life – is put on ice.
The birth of a child, arguably the biggest thing to happen to a person, is also supposed to be the most joyous of occurrences. Grace’s experience, however, is anything but. Left to her own devices while Jackson works away from home, Grace starts to crumble under the weight of isolation, loneliness, and boredom. The more she tries to care for her baby (alone), the more she realizes her life has fundamentally changed for the worse.
It would be reductive to call Die, My Love a film about postpartum depression, though the understudied phenomenon certainly plays a part. More than just a story of one mother’s spiralling marriage or mental health, it is a near-paradigmatic account of how society treats women with children, vs. how they actually feel as house-bound carers. Lawrence finds the role of a lifetime as raging Grace; you should see the film for her performance alone. –Ana Yorke
Eddington – Director: Ari Aster (A24)
A comic neo-Western with a bent for hyperreality and savage satirical viewpoint, Ari Aster’s Eddington is set in the kind of remote, raggedy New Mexico town where people are on a first-name basis, the scattered businesses look dusty and on the verge of bankruptcy, and more than two cars on the same block qualifies as a traffic jam.
As in many Westerns, the unresolved disputes of a small community are refracted through a looming showdown. Here, the confrontation is between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whose animus centers on the COVID-19 masking policies implemented at the start of the story, in May 2020. As his fight with Ted escalates from petty insults to street confrontations, Joe lives increasingly in the dopamine-hazed mania of online discourse circa mid-2020. After getting a dose of Internet fame from being livestreamed, Joe challenges Ted for the mayoral election, drives around town in a truck whose many signs include a rant about Bill Gates, and mainlines rage-baiting fake news. As chaos accelerates, secrets and madness proliferate.
In Aster’s earlier films, those qualities bubble up in gut-wrenching ways; as in 2019’s Midsommar, his undermining of folk ceremony beauty with the savagery in that film’s source material, Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery”. With Eddington, Aster doesn’t disappoint on this score. The film’s final stretch dramatically transitions into a spree of calculated, then increasingly violent, action. Spaghetti Western dramatics and glisteningly gory renderings of bullet-punctured heads are dissonantly paired with the is-this-happening? apocalyptic absurdism of his previous film, Beau Is Afraid (2023), as well as the ruminative action-comedy sensibility of Bill Hader’s Barry series (2018–23). Fantastical without losing touch with lived American reality, Eddington shows Aster journeying from elevated horror auteur to gonzo fever dreamer and now Rüben Östlund-like social satirist. – Chris Barsanti
See also “‘Eddington’ Is a Feverishly Funny Neo-Western Provocation“, by Chris Barsanti.
Good News – Director: Byun Sung-hyun (Netflix)
It’s been another great year for Korean cinema. Besides the somewhat more prominent releases by Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon Ho, Byun Sung-hyun’s Good News completes the trifecta of quirky, darkly comical films about (neo)imperialist ambitions and screw-ups. Written and directed by Byun for Netflix, it premiered in September at the Toronto Film Festival, quickly drawing attention to its competent handling of (yet another) strange topic.
More concretely historical in its roots than Mickey 17 or No Other Choice, Good News loosely recounts the events of the 1970 hijacking of a Japanese passenger plane. On the one hand, the members of the Japanese militant communist organization, The Red Army Faction, demand to be flown to North Korea, hoping to organize other Japanese communists to overthrow the government. On the other hand, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency deploys “Nobody”, a mysterious North Korean defector, to rescue the hostages and thus position South Korea favorably in the eyes of Japan, its former overlord.
Unlike most recent Korean hits, Good News doesn’t scope the troubles of the general populace; rather, it satirizes the incompetence and purposelessness of middle management and excessive layers of bureaucracy. At times clichéd and over the top, this hilarious black comedy still works like a charm in terms of showing the state’s priorities when people’s lives are at stake. Its wobbling tonal shifts are aided by the cast, who know how to land a joke, but it’s the scathing view of individual and collective self-centeredness that makes Good News a timely story of how it is that everything goes wrong when it shouldn’t. – Ana Yorke
Hamnet – Director: Chloe Zhao (Focus Features)
A film about William Shakespeare, about as much as The Social Network is about Facebook, Chloe Zhao’s fifth feature is a study of love and grief that will tear you to pieces. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel, Hamnet reimagines the history behind Shakespeare’s most celebrated play as a family tragedy. Starring a never-better Jessie Buckley as Agnes (Anne) Hathaway and Paul Mescal as “husband Will” (The Bard), it tells the story of a couple from Stratford-upon-Avon whose bond is shaken by a devastating loss.
Zhao, famous for her empathy and unwavering belief in (her characters’) future, refuses to make Hamnet a miserable, sentimental tale of loss. Instead, coupling O’Farrell’s passionately feminist story with Max Richter’s otherworldly, poignant score, she gives us a narrative of human endurance, with family as the kernel of strength that keeps us moving forward.
Buckley is spectacular as Agnes, a young outcast “witch”, whose bond with nature scares her town’s “intellectuals”, Shakespeare among them. A masterful falconer and maker of herbal remedies, Agnes is the polar opposite of her young suitor Will, a perky smartass who dreams of becoming a playwright. Nevertheless, the two fall deeply in love and start a family. Agnes bears three children, among them a precocious boy, Hamnet, and swears to protect them forever, while Will sets off to London to stage plays.
Alas, parents, even mothers, aren’t omnipotent, and Hamnet boldly explores the depths of suffering inflicted by powerlessness and loneliness in the face of an unimaginable fate. At times unbearably sad, it is also that rare unflinching film that doesn’t hold anything back, showing us what a life that must go on looks like – but also proving that life, in fact, does go on, propelled by the force of loving. –Ana Yorke