Manohla Dargis
In Search of the Art
It was another great year for the movies and another horrible, hair-on-fire year for the industry, as each month brought more bummer box-office news. The litany of woes is familiar: There aren’t enough studio releases, moviegoing is overly expensive, people want to stream, whatever. The bigger picture is always more complicated, and it’s worth repeating (again!) that the business, and that avatar known as Hollywood, isn’t synonymous with cinema. As usual, I had a tough time winnowing all the movies I liked down to 10, but here are your reminders that what matters to us moviegoers isn’t the industry’s bottom line but the art.
1. ‘Sinners’ (Ryan Coogler)
One of the most exhilarating movies of the year, “Sinners” defies expectation at every turn. Set largely in Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1930s, it draws from different genres for a uniquely American horror story about race and resistance, art and community that’s anchored by twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) whose world is threatened by white vampirism. As darkness descends, the story’s horizons open to incorporate the sweep of American history, one whose soundtrack is the blues. If the big studios want a sustainable future, they need to make room for more filmmakers like Coogler.
2. ‘One Battle After Another’ (Paul Thomas Anderson)
As American as apple pie and anti-authoritarianism, Anderson’s carnivalesque film opens on a ragtag group of would-be revolutionaries (among them Teyana Taylor’s dynamo) liberating migrants from a detention center. The shock of that scene reverberates throughout this beautifully directed and acted film, which narrows on one burnout member (Leonardo DiCaprio). Roused to action, he stumbles out of his cannabis-infused stupor like the ghost of radicalism past for yet another battle, one that others have been fighting — and will fight — far better.
3. ‘Marty Supreme’ (Josh Safdie)
From the minute this picaresque opens, Safdie rarely takes his foot off the gas. It opens on the Lower East Side in the early 1950s, where a Jewish shoe clerk — a sensational Timothée Chalamet — nurses grandiose dreams and hatches endless schemes. A story of an American outsider-striver, the movie evokes the likes of Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” and Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?” but is also a Safdie movie through and through. I’ll have more to say about it when it opens Dec. 25.
4. ‘It Was Just an Accident’ (Jafar Panahi)
An allegory that takes place on and off the road, Panahi’s latest centers on a group of men and women deciding the fate of a man one of them took captive. They believe that the hostage may be their former prison guard, a sadist in service to the regime. As they drive in and around Tehran, they bond and bicker, and travel onto political and philosophical terrain. Panahi, who’s served time in prison for running afoul of the Iranian government, drew from his experiences and those of other inmates for this slow-boiling ethical thriller about action and inaction, and what it means for people to resist together.
5. ‘BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions’ (Kahlil Joseph)
Intimate and sweeping, intellectually exciting and formally audacious, Joseph’s essay movie takes as its point of departure “Africana,” an encyclopedia of Africa and people of African descent edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., which was inspired by a project that W.E.B. Du Bois began before his death in 1963. For his mind-expanding meditation on Black lives, identities and experiences, Joseph deploys a dizzying mix of new and archival material, traverses centuries and continents, invents new worlds and showcases thinkers like Saidiya Hartman. It’s a trip!
6. ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow’ (Julia Loktev)
Don’t let the five-hour-plus running time put you off this collective portrait of journalists, mostly women, who have committed themselves to reporting the truth about President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia in the face of escalating, government threats. Loktev began making the movie in 2021, the year the government started cracking down on journalists as “foreign agents,” and she continued as Russia invaded Ukraine. She shot the movie on an iPhone (she has a very good eye), which deepens the movie’s intimacy. With each passing hour, you fall for — and worry about — these journalists, whose integrity, resolve and gutsy reporting serve as a rebuke to tyranny.
7. ‘Sorry, Baby’ (Eva Victor)
Victor takes the lead in her emotionally delicate, tragicomic feature directing debut. She plays a professor, Agnes, who lives in a cozy house not far from the small New England college where she teaches and where, years earlier, her life indelibly changed. Something terrible happened to Agnes, and while you can guess what took place, Victor gradually eases you into the story with sensitivity and jolts of wit. An exploration of trauma that evades the usual tidy clichés of many trauma stories, “Sorry, Baby” is a portrait of a woman groping toward making peace with the past as she finds her place in the present.
8. ‘The Secret Agent’ (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
When Marcelo (Wagner Moura) rolls up to fill the tank of his Volkswagen Beetle at a gas station, he immediately blanches at the corpse rotting nearby. Flies are buzzing and stray dogs soon come running even as the police pass it by. Set in 1977 during the Brazilian dictatorship — “a period of great mischief,” as the movie coyly puts it — Mendonça Filho’s latest follows Marcelo as he goes into a hiding in this surprising, adamantly non-formulaic escapade. A mix of moods and tones ornamented with surrealistic touches, “The Secret Agent” is at once a political time capsule and unnervingly topical.
9. ‘Caught by the Tides’ (Jia Zhangke)
In this sui generis hybrid, Jia joins the story of a woman with that of China itself and a mix of fiction and nonfiction film and video that he began shooting more than 20 years ago. Using the lovelorn Qiaoqiao (played by Zhao Tao, the filmmaker’s wife) as his narrative through line, Jia relays a twinned story of an individual and a country that’s by turns melancholic and hopeful, and insistently grounded in the material world. Betrayed by her petty criminal boyfriend, Qiaoqiao never utters a word; she doesn’t need to. Like Jia’s own penetrating gaze, her lapidary expressiveness speaks volumes about the seismic changes affecting the reality around her.
10. ‘The Mastermind’ (Kelly Reichardt)
What do we owe one another is the question that movingly hangs over Reichardt’s subtle portrait of a family man turned petty criminal and fugitive (a low-key, heroically unheroic Josh O’Connor). Set in 1970, it opens with O’Connor’s J.B. scoping out the small, regional museum that he and some colleagues will soon rob. Despite their comically amateurish bumbling, the thieves manage to successfully (miraculously!) steal a small number of abstract paintings. Their ostensible triumph proves short-lived and finally beside the point in a movie that quietly and steadily shifts into an ethical reckoning about the harms of individualism in the face of urgent collective need.
Here are some of the other movies that I liked and urge you to see: “Presence,” “No Other Land,” “The Annihilation of Fish,” “Mickey 17,” “Black Bag,” “Materialists,” “Souleymane’s Story,” “Highest 2 Lowest,” “Suspended Time,” “Megadoc,” “Blue Moon,” “Orwell: 2+2=5,” “The Alabama Solution,” “A House of Dynamite,” “The Perfect Neighbor,” “Sentimental Value,” “Nouvelle Vague,” “Resurrection,” “Cover-Up,” “The Testament of Ann Lee” and “No Other Choice.”
Alissa Wilkinson
Grappling With History
This year at the movies, the same refrain kept ringing in my mind, a line from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It seemed like so many of the most interesting, vibrant, daring movies — the ones taking the biggest swings or wrestling with the thorniest ideas — were all tuned into that important idea. History has long tentacles that reach into the present in ways we don’t always expect; we can’t escape the past, and we’d better not try to rewrite it, either.
That’s all very relevant when it comes to, say, American politics. But what’s great about the movies — about all art, really — is that it’s how humans work out what’s bothering us. So the movies this year show that filmmakers working in many modes, across the globe, are all thinking about the past, present and future, and about the world we inherited and will pass on. I watched films set in Iran and Russia and Mississippi. I shrieked at horror and howled at comedy. I was mesmerized by a five-hour documentary epic and floored by a tiny movie about fading community ties. I held my breath and exhaled loudly and remembered that the great thing about cinema is how we get to remember our history and dream about the future — together.
1. ‘One Battle After Another’ (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Sometimes you can tell a movie is just going to work from practically the first frame, and that’s “One Battle After Another.” Virtuosic performances, assured directing, propulsive rhythm, spot-on needle drops — yes, all the elements are there. But what makes “One Battle” the best film of the year is how these all lock together to tell a truth we rarely dare to acknowledge: No generation, no matter how idealistic, will ever solve the world’s problems. We’ll hand our children what we messed up and tell them it’s their turn now. And they’ll take up those battles in their own way.
2. ‘It Was Just an Accident’ (Jafar Panahi)
Panahi knows well the havoc that autocratic regimes can wreak on artists: He’s spent most of his career restricted or imprisoned by his own government in Iran but making movies anyway. This Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece of tragicomedy, the first he’s directed since his release from prison in 2023, is about how being treated with cruelty tends to make humans lash out cruelly — and how, for powerful people who want to keep their power, that’s the whole point.
3. ‘My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow’ (Julia Loktev)
Loktev’s camera captures the gradually tightening net around a group of independent journalists in Moscow in the months before President Vladimir V. Putin orders the invasion of Ukraine. In the process, the film’s five-plus hours illustrate the ways that authoritarian rule slowly chokes the free press: first with bureaucratic red tape and declarations of opposition to the state; then with more severe, and dangerous measures. It’s the most thrilling, terrifying film of the year.
4. ‘Marty Supreme’ (Josh Safdie)
Watching Timothée Chalamet’s frenetic, swaggering table-tennis champ hustle and strut his way through 1950s New York can feel like clinging to the back of an amped-up alley cat for a couple of hours: totally nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating. But the story beneath the story is what made “Marty Supreme” so marvelous to me: It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of anti-Semitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.
5. ‘The Testament of Ann Lee’ (Mona Fastvold)
I’ve never seen a movie like this one, and can’t imagine I ever will. The life of the founder of the somewhat obscure Shaker sect is a weird enough pitch for a film, but making it a musical adds an extra layer of singularity. I can’t help but think that in the hands of any filmmaker other than Fastvold, this would have been a horror film, but instead it’s a tale of beauty, ecstasy and religious devotion, uncompromisingly committed to Ann Lee’s vision of simplicity and divinity, stunning in every frame.
6. ‘Predators’ (David Osit)
Ostensibly, this staggering documentary is about the NBC television show “To Catch a Predator.” But it rapidly becomes about much more: Why are we drawn to watching bad people be humiliated? What kind of internet culture did “To Catch a Predator” spawn? And what are the human implications of all of this? Osit carefully tugs on these threads, leaving the viewer both ruminating and reeling.
7. ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’ (Sepideh Farsi)
The subject of Farsi’s documentary, a Palestinian woman named Fatma Hassona, was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after the film was accepted to the Cannes Film Festival. So not only is it a document of an unusual friendship between two women — an exiled Iranian filmmaker and a photojournalist in Gaza City who never met in person — but it’s also a chronicle of life under impossible circumstances and a memorial to Hassona, too.
8. ‘Sinners’ (Ryan Coogler)
I think this is the year’s most talked-about movie, and with good reason. Audacious, visually captivating, brimming with symbolism yet bursting with palpable life, it’s haunted by history and music and centuries of sorrow and joy. That one scene of music and dancing — you know the one — would alone be enough to land it on the list of best movies of the year.
9. ‘Eephus’ (Carson Lund)
Though it’s technically a baseball movie, “Eephus” is really an elegy for a kind of small-town community — it takes place on the final day a men’s amateur league will be able to play on their beloved ballfield. It’s a hangout movie, and not much happens, which means it perfectly embodies what’s great about baseball and about neighborly friendship, too.
10. ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ (Kaouther Ben Hania)
The story of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a vehicle in northern Gaza with family members who had been killed by Israeli military fire, captured international attention in 2024. For the film, Ben Hania blended real audio from the girl’s emergency calls with scenes of actors playing the Red Crescent workers who worked to save her. It’s both superb filmmaking and utterly gutting.
Also recommended: “Blue Moon,” “Blue Sun Palace,” “Die My Love,” “Eddington,” “Frankenstein,” “Hamnet,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “I’m Still Here,” “Is This Thing On?”, “Life After,” “Lurker,” “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” “The Mastermind,” “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “The Plague,” “Superman,” “Train Dreams.”
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post Best Movies of 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
