When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered 3.5 stars or more from The Washington Post’s critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Sonia Rao, Michael Andor Brodeur, Philip Kennicott, Janice Page, Jada Yuan, Jen Yamato, Michael O’Sullivan, Monica Hesse, Naveen Kumar, Thomas Floyd, Travis M. Andrews and Chris Klimek — identified by their initials below).
Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2025 are eligible for inclusion.)
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Filmmaker Rian Johnson displays his impressive skill once again in the third installment in his “Knives Out” franchise. Like its predecessors, the new film, which takes place at a small Catholic church in Upstate New York, is hilarious and twisty-turny enough to keep you enthralled until the very end. But it also ends up striking the deepest chord of the bunch, layering onto the puzzle a thoughtful meditation on religion and faith. Daniel Craig returns as the eccentric detective Benoit Blanc, and Josh O’Connor plays an ambitious young priest. (PG-13, 144 minutes) — Sonia Rao
Where to watch: In theaters; available Dec. 12 on Netflix
Left-Handed Girl
The first solo feature from “Anora” director Sean Baker’s longtime collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou is also Taiwan’s submission to the 98th Academy Awards. The film’s adorable, unreliable narrator is 5-year-old I-Jing (Nina Ye), who has just moved to Taipei with her mother and college-age sister, all starting over from rock bottom because the girls’ father abandoned them. Centering a film on a child is often a recipe for disaster, but Tsou and Baker already had practice (see: “The Florida Project”). “Left-Handed Girl” is far less harrowing, but it has the same nonjudgmental gaze and the vérité camera stylings. (R, 109 minutes) — Jada Yuan
Where to watch: Netflix
Hamnet
Reams of scholarship and fictional takes have imagined how Shakespeare’s earthly life influenced his plays. “Hamnet” isn’t one of them. The boldly devastating film from Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao is far more primal than a speculative portrait of the artist. As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, it’s a literal revelation focused on the woman left behind to rear their children as the playwright’s career shone on the London stage. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut. (PG-13, 125 minutes) — Naveen Kumar
Where to watch: In theaters
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier’s family drama is billed as a story about a father and daughters’ complicated relationship with each other, but it’s equally about their complicated relationship with their art. Stellan Skarsgard plays a celebrated, self-centered director whose latest project is the semiautobiographical retelling of a tragedy in the family’s past. Renate Reinsve, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning deliver stunning performances as the women caught up in his orbit. (R, 134 minutes) — Monica Hesse
Where to watch: In theaters
The Running Man
Director Edgar Wright’s bloody hoot of a movie isn’t so much an update of 1987’s second-best Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle as it is a more faithful translation of the eponymous 1982 Stephen King novella. King’s book, set in the nightmare future of 2025, imagined a United States afflicted by gross wealth inequality, ecological ruin, lawless lawmen, deepfake videos, a shady new currency and a populace distracted from all of it by a diet of sadistic reality programming. Satire, right? (R, 133 minutes) — Chris Klimek
Where to watch: In theaters
Peter Hujar’s Day
This quiet and compelling film uses Hujar’s own words to recount the minutiae of a single day in the life of the photographer who died of AIDS complications in 1987. Ira Sachs (“Passages,” “Keep the Lights On”) leans on an interview transcript to construct an engrossing two-character film, starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, that immerses viewers so deeply in the New York of a half century ago that you can almost smell the exhaust wafting through open windows and garbage rotting in the Hudson River. (Unrated, 76 minutes) — Philip Kennicott
Where to watch: In theaters
Train Dreams
Clint Bentley’s elegiac movie, based on the 2011 Denis Johnson novella, follows the life of logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) in the early 20th century throughout the Pacific Northwest. It’s a movie in which nothing much happens, and yet it’s all deeply affecting — a meditation on life, providing respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point. (PG-13, 102 minutes) — Travis M. Andrews
Where to watch: Netflix
Bugonia
The 10th feature from director Yorgos Lanthimos is an English-language remake of Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s “Save the Green Planet!” It’s a viciously smart and disturbingly funny abduction tale, primarily confined to a grubby basement but with a purview that extends from the inner sanctums of memory to the outer reaches of the galaxy. Jesse Plemons stars as a part-time beekeeper, part-time e-commerce drone and full-time conspiracy theorist who plots the abduction of Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the CEO of a pharmaceutical company whose drugs may have left his mother comatose. (R, 118 minutes) — Michael Andor Brodeur
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
It Was Just an Accident
“It Was Just an Accident” ends twice. Both times, its brilliance can take your breath away. That is, what breath you have left by the third and fourth acts of Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi’s latest relentless road trip, wherein the destination isn’t a place or a thing, but a masterful commentary on power. Panahi, whose 30-year résumé includes “Taxi,” “The Circle,” “Offside” and “This Is Not a Film,” has made interrogating authoritarianism and its abuses a hallmark of his career. This is a filmmaker whose work always earns its resistance adjectives. (PG-13, 102 minutes) — Janice Page
Where to watch: In theaters
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Hurt Locker”), screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (“Jackie”) and a hard-charging cast keep us locked into a crisis unfolding at light speed. It starts when radar at a military base in Alaska picks up an intercontinental ballistic missile headed for the United States. Is it a test? Uh, no. Who launched it? No one’s sure. Where’s it headed? For a major urban center. “A House of Dynamite” isn’t really about nuclear war. It’s about what a government looks like when everyone in it is competent. (R, 112 minutes) — Ty Burr
Where to watch: Netflix
One Battle After Another
It isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres that writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time. Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti and Benicio Del Toro star. (R, 161 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
Lurker
The debut feature film from Alex Russell (co-writer of “The Bear” and “Beef”) arrives bearing uncomfortable truths about the symbiotic relationship between celebrities and hangers-on. Who needs the other the most? It’s a power dynamic in perfect balance. Théodore Pellerin is unnerving as Matthew, a gawky Los Angeles wraith who affixes himself to Oliver (Archie Madekwe), a young pop singer on the rise. This is a film and filmmaker well versed in Hollywood existentialism: the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
A Little Prayer
A small-scale, nearly perfect drama of small-town American lives, this film draws you in the way a well-written novel does, and the character at its center is a flawed, decent, troubled man — an ordinary hero rather than the super kind. If you need further enticement, know that David Strathairn plays that decent, troubled man, a soft-spoken North Carolina patriarch helplessly watching his family come apart. Angus MacLachlan directs. (R, 89 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
Weapons
An almost absurdly enjoyable nerve-shredding night at the movies that vaults writer-director Zach Cregger into the esteemed company of modern horror maestros like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers. Where Cregger’s 2022 breakthrough “Barbarian” appeared to be telling one story before turning darker and weirder, “Weapons” slowly turns up the narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked. (R, 128 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
Cloud
A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s bleak film warns against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature. Its protagonist, an unscrupulous e-tailer paying a violent price for his own ruthlessness, is so unapologetic that one could debate whether he’s the villain or the victim, but genre maven Kurosawa knows that a redemption arc would be far too trite for a scammer like this. (Unrated, 124 minutes) — Jen Yamato
Where to watch: Apple TV
Together
The feature debut of writer-director Michael Shanks plays with the push-pull of romantic attachment like a cat toying with a hapless mouse, assisted by Dave Franco and Alison Brie as a couple whose prickly, passive-aggressive relationship takes on increasing shades of body horror. That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary. (R, 102 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
Architecton
The third film in Victor Kossakovsky’s “A” series (after 2011’s “Vivan las Antipodas” and 2018’s “Aquarela”) isn’t explicitly about architecture, but rather about the raw materials of architecture and the ethos of waste, recklessness and destruction that drives our planetary folly of building, destroying and building yet again. Like Kossakovsky’s extraordinary 2020 documentary, “Gunda,” “Architecton” works more by ethical immersion than by direct argument. (G, 97 minutes) — P.K.
Where to watch: Apple TV
40 Acres
“40 Acres” is a genre movie the way genre movies are supposed to be but rarely are. It reimagines an old premise (the setting is 12 years after a pandemic, a second civil war and the onset of a global famine) with well-crafted action, thematic richness, committed performances and so much tension that the audience might snap before the characters do. Best of all, it features the brilliant Danielle Deadwyler as a ferocious postapocalyptic Mother Courage. (R, 113 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Familiar Touch
Because we live in a culture that worships youth, movies about old age are few. Among recent entries like “Amour,” “The Father” and “Thelma,” Sarah Friedland’s “Familiar Touch” may be the gentlest and most mysterious, presenting the narrowing days of a woman’s life as a kind of lucid dreaming — a stepping backward into a child’s sensations and then further, into an amniotic state of simply being. Patient, observant and slow, the film benefits immeasurably from the presence of veteran stage actress Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role. (Unrated, 91 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
The Life of Chuck
Adapted by Mike Flanagan from Stephen King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent. Flanagan wants his audience to reflect on the passing moments of connection that carry outsize significance and the simple joys that make life worth living. Not saccharine but soulful, “The Life of Chuck” arrives at life-affirming profundity through a blend of surrealist wonder and humanist truth. (R, 111 minutes) — Thomas Floyd
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Deaf President Now!
The events depicted in this documentary, which revisits the 1988 protest by students at Gallaudet University that led to the selection of the school’s first deaf president in its 124-year history, may not seem like such a big deal. But in this stirring telling by co-directors Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim — who seek a radical kind of oral history that goes beyond traditional talking heads — the achievement lands with the force of the first salvo in a revolution. (TV-MA, 99 minutes) — Michael O’Sullivan
Where to watch: Apple TV
The Legend of Ochi
This family film takes place in an otherworldly Eastern Europe, on an island with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in 1970s Soviet entropy. The main character, an unenthusiastic enlistee in an army of little boy monster hunters, discovers a newborn Ochi (an adorably fierce creation of puppetry that resembles Baby Yoda) and vows to return it to its mother. If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it and seems fashioned for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next. (PG, 96 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s wildly entertaining mash-up of genres, tonal flavors and stunning production values veers confidently between pulpy and profound, never sacrificing what’s on its mind for its primary aim, which is to shock and enthrall. There’s a culture war raging within the throbbing, thrumming 1930s juke joint that serves as its backdrop; viewers should rest assured — or be forewarned — that this particular skirmish will leave blood on the floor. (R, 137 minutes) — Ann Hornaday
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Misericordia
The French writer-director Alain Guiraudie makes transgressive dramas that double as the bleakest of black comedies, where friendships between men veer from social to sexual to antagonistic and back, and where the morality of a country village can be a thin veneer over the darkest deeds of the heart. “Misericordia” is less sexually explicit than Guiraudie’s most well-known movie, the Cannes prizewinner “Stranger by the Lake,” but it’s no less fascinatingly, even amusingly wicked. (Unrated, 104 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
One to One: John & Yoko
It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort. Co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards have done an impressively deep archival dive to give us this portrait of John Lennon in 1972, the year the ex-Beatle arrived in New York City to stay and embarked on a period of radical politics and art, accompanied by his wife, muse, collaborator and co-instigator Yoko Ono, whose mere presence drove most people nuts. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Eephus
In baseball, an “eephus” is a trick pitch, a high-arcing throw that discombobulates a hitter while dazzling the crowd. Which is not a bad description of “Eephus,” a tiny but nearly perfect movie that bids goodbye not only to a local ballfield and the middle-aged men who play on it, but to a vanishing America for whom baseball was the game — a definition of how we congregate and compete and build small myths to sustain us after the final at-bat. (Unrated, 99 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
The guinea fowl is a ubiquitous, henlike bird native to Africa, where it’s known for traveling in flocks and raising a noisy alarm when predators are nearby. In Rungano Nyoni’s scalding Cannes prizewinner “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the bird serves as a metaphor for a society that will do anything to avoid listening. Nyoni’s film is a keening black comedy with sparks of magical realism and folktale, in which she lets the visual and thematic pieces of the dramatic puzzle fall into place gradually. (PG-13, 99 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Nearly a decade ago, Britain’s perennially hapless rom-com heroine Bridget Jones actually did make it to marriage and motherhood after three movies and countless comical indignities. But in the tender, sexy coda “Mad About the Boy,” the fourth film adapted from Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary novel series, she discovers there’s more life to live after the happily-ever-after. It’s the best of the sequels yet. A buoyant and luminous Renée Zellweger returns as a widowed Bridget, with Leo Woodall of “The White Lotus” as her younger love interest, Roxster. Michael Morris directs. (R, 124 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Peacock
No Other Land
Filmed from 2019 to 2023, this documentary is the work of a joint Palestinian-Israeli collective of four filmmakers, but really it’s the story of two of them and of a friendship that is both hopeful and hopeless. Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist who grew up in the southern Hebron Hills. Yuval Abraham is a young Israeli whose political views were changed by studying Arabic in high school; now he tries to get stories of the demolitions of Palestinian villages into an Israeli news media that doesn’t want to hear it. As an act of citizen journalism, “No Other Land” is a document as damning as they come, and it lands in this endless, bitterly complex struggle like an argument that refuses to be rationalized away. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
Porcelain War
This documentary about the conflict in Ukraine and the citizen army fighting back against Russia’s invasion focuses squarely on artists and craftspeople who by necessity have become warriors. Are their senses and sensibilities dulled by the violence around them and the violence they’re forced to wreak? Or are they more alert to the pains, paradoxes and even joys of struggling through to the end of each day alive? “Porcelain War” is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death. (R, 87 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Prime Video
I’m Still Here
Director Walter Salles crafts an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane. In 1970, Brazil existed in a state of constant tension, with a military dictatorship overseeing a resurgent economy and the increasingly brutal repression of anyone it saw as stepping out of line. Among the latter was Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a civil engineer and congressman, whose disappearance unleashed the fury and determination of his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres) — this film’s real hero. (PG-13, 136 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Presence
A ghost story, as told from the point of view of the ghost. “Presence” is more unsettling than scary, more dramatically gripping than nerve-shredding. And it’s directed by Steven Soderbergh, so you know it has to be smart. His camera silently roams an old suburban house, unable to step past the doors outside, putting the audience inside the mind of a phantom as it yearns to protect the most vulnerable member of the family that lives there. (R, 84 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Hard Truths
Building his scripts through collaborative improvisation with his casts, director Mike Leigh creates itchy comedy-dramas about life’s misfits and reprobates and, occasionally, its optimists — average folk, often, who create and survive their own mundane disasters. “Hard Truths” stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a middle-aged, working-class Londoner with a gift for invective and complaint: a woman of titanic feeling who has somehow become a prisoner of herself. (R, 97 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Better Man
This delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) chronicles British pop singer and former boy band sensation Robbie Williams, revisiting the singer’s tumultuous rise and celebrating his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits (“Angels” among them). American audiences might be shocked at how well it works on all fronts. Especially considering that Williams is rendered throughout as a CGI chimpanzee. (R, 135 minutes) — M.A.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Nickel Boys
Adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was inspired by the true story of dozens of young men (the majority of them Black) tortured and killed at a reform institution in the Florida Panhandle, RaMell Ross (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) reinvents the cinema as a language of hope. Hope for what? Survival, connection, bearing witness to historical crimes, the sacrament of peering into another person’s soul. It’s one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year. (PG-13, 140 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple TV, Prime Video
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