It’s been a good year for voices long unheard. Ryan Coogler blended horror with social injustice and rendered an epic period piece steeped in blood. Newcomer Eva Victor delivered an affecting debut condemning men abusing power in academia and praising the perseverance of sisterhood – shot on our North Shore. Oscar winner Chloé Zhao brought a female lens to the Bard of Avon’s grief. Boris Lojkine shone a light on the plight of a dreamer from Guinea trying to make it in Paris as a bike courier. From Norway, Joachim Trier showed the unreconciled chasm between an egotistical father and his daughters in the wake of his ex-wife’s passing.
The movie scene is getting weirder. Highly anticipated art house fare – and possible Oscar contenders – such as “Blue Moon,” “If I Had Legs I Would Kick You,” Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident” and Victor’s “Sorry Baby” never played this side of the Charles, while the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema seemingly became a front for Netflix to open movies such as “Nouvelle Vague,” “Black Bag,” “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” and the middling “Jay Kelly” for a few Oscar-qualifying weeks before they’re moved to the media giant’s streaming platform – one likely to get bigger if a merger with Warner Brothers happens. It’s complicated. The Golden Globes just put “Avatar: Fire and Ash” in its Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category award, a slate reserved for movies that rack up $150 million or more at the box office, when the film has yet to be released or earn a single dollar. (It opens this week.) This year meant saying adieu to the auteur of weird, David Lynch, and to the beloved goofball everyman, Rob Reiner, the victim of a horrible crime.
Below are the Day’s top 10 films of 2025. Also in consideration were “One to One: John & Yoko,” “Black Bag,” “The Testament of Ann Lee,” “Sorry Baby,” “Train Dreams,” “The Mastermind,” “Eddington” and “The Life of Chuck.”
10. “Sinners”
The most pleasant surprise of the year was Coogler’s raucous, southern-fried tale of vampires, gangsters and the blues. A pair of fast-talking twins (Michael B. Jordan in a magnetic dual role) returns home in 1930s Mississippi to open a juke joint, only to find their haven beset by white Irish vampires. “Sinners” is Coogler’s first original film in more than a decade following work on the “Black Panther” and “Creed” franchises, allowing him the freedom to pursue his own ideas and inspirations. The results are wildly entertaining and often breathtaking, and a time-slipping dance sequence in which revelers are joined by Black musical figures past and future is an easy contender for scene of the year. Coogler has assembled an ensemble for the ages, including Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld as the twins’ love interests, Delroy Lindo as a wizened blues man and fresh face Miles Caton as a young guitar virtuoso. This is what blockbuster filmmaking should be. Reviewed April 17. (Oscar Goff)
On HBO Max.
9. “Bugonia”
What if the fate of the universe were to be decided between a podcast-pilled lone-wolf psycho and a soulless, out-of-touch CEO? That’s the question at the heart of Yorgos Lanthimos’ blackly comic chamber piece. Jesse Plemons plays a blue-collar serf who kidnaps and tortures his Fortune 500 boss (the great Emma Stone), convinced she’s an alien bent on world domination. “Bugonia” is a remake of the South Korean cult classic “Save the Green Planet!” (2003), but Lanthimos (“The Lobster,” “Kinds of Kindness”) adapts the material keenly to contemporary America. Plemons and Stone are two of our most daring actors, and the scenes in which they face off in a basement allow both to shine (also great is newcomer Aidan Delbis, heartbreaking as Plemons’ neurodivergent cousin and accomplice). The humor comes from the characters’ utter inability to communicate, each encased as they are in their respective online bubbles. Whether or not there are aliens in our midst, we all might as well be from different planets. Reviewed Nov. 3. (Oscar Goff)
At the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square, and available on demand.
8. “Sentimental Value”
As much as Stellan Skarsgård’s male egotist is the catalyst for all that happens in this story of grief, struggle and reconciliation, it’s the feminine side of the house that gives “Sentimental Value” its heart and humanity. Skarsgård plays a filmmaker on the magnitude of Bergman – his name is Borg – looking to make one final picture and fix transgressions with his daughters in the wake of his ex-wife’s death. Art and the desire for legacy are at the fore, but the real heart is the connection between the sisters played by Renate Reinsve, who worked with director Trier on the much heralded “Worst Person in the World” (2019), and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as they grapple with their sense of identity and familial truths. It’s very Bergman-esque. Complicating the picture is a famous American actor (Elle Fanning, great, and also wickedly funny in this year’s “Predator: Badlands”) who steps into a part of Borg’s endeavor written for his elder daughter (Reinsve), who, due to past deeds or misdeeds, declines. The script is from the heart, and the ensemble near untouchable. Reviewed Nov. 25. (Tom Meek)
At AMC Assembly Row 12, 395 Artisan Way, Assembly Square, Somerville.
7. “The Secret Agent”
A two-headed cat. A dead body lying casually outside a gas station, which neither employees nor police can be bothered to remove. A hopping, stop-motion disembodied leg wreaking havoc in a park full of late-night trysts. These are just a few of the unforgettable images in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s densely layered, magical realist political potboiler. Wagner Moura plays a humble university professor turned reluctant dissident, trying desperately to arrange passage out of the authoritarian Brazil of the 1970s for himself and his young son. Every time you think you have a handle on where this story is going, however, Mendonça throws another narrative curveball or dizzyingly surreal visual. “The Secret Agent” captures both the horrors of the ’70s Brazilian regime and the delirium of Carnival in one of the smartest and most unclassifiable thrillers of the year. (Oscar Goff)
At the Somerville Theatre, 55 Davis Square.
6. “Marty Supreme”
The divorce of filmmaking wunderkinds the Safdie brothers, Boston University grads who cooked up the well-received crime curios “Good Time” (2017) and “Uncut Gems” (2019), has raised question without answers. Who cares? This year Benny dropped the MMA biopic flick “The Smashing Machine” with Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, which didn’t quite go to mat the way many prognosticated. The one making this list is Josh’s tale about an egomaniacal table tennis player in the late 1950s – based loosely on the exploits of the flamboyant Marty Reisman and starring it-boy Timothée Chalamet as the pingpong supreme being of the title. Like Adam Sandler’s gambling-addicted hustler in “Gems,” Marty’s always hustling to finance his next tournament trip to Japan, and he’s got a million bad moves in between that are on the verge of blowing up, be it impregnating his neighbor’s wife, kidnapping a mafioso’s dog or having an affair with a Grace Kelly-like former Hollywood star (Gwyneth Paltrow, sliding into the role nicely). It’s a madcap turn that keeps amping up the tension in unexpected ways. The casting is devilish, with magician-funnyman Penn Jillette and gruff director Abel Ferrara (“Bad Lieutenant”) as shoot-first sociopaths and Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” as Paltrow’s rich and cocksure hubby. Point, Josh. (Tom Meek)
Opens Christmas Day.
5. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
Motherhood on screen is often portrayed as something akin to saintliness. In Mary Bronstein’s nightmare comedy, it’s much closer to the seventh circle of hell. Rose Byrne is at the top of her game as a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her young daughter (largely kept just out of frame) has an unspecified illness that keeps her tethered to a constantly beeping machine. Her husband (Christian Slater) is a cruise director, and thus almost entirely absent. Her therapist (Conan O’Brien) can hardly mask his withering contempt for her. And a burst pipe in her apartment sends her fleeing to a purgatory-like fleabag motel for an indeterminate period. Bronstein is a longtime Safdie associate (she directed the brothers in her 2008 debut “Yeast” long before they found fame) and shares their knack for on-screen anxiety, realizing the film as a feature-length panic attack. In Byrne, she has found a perfect vessel, painfully hilarious even as we fear for her (and her daughter’s) well-being. Call your mother – or at least send her a bottle of the hard stuff. (Oscar Goff)
Available on demand.
4. “Weapons”
Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 surprise art house horror hit “Barbarian” builds just as confidently with moxie and an acrid, enigmatic mood. “Weapons” has you from the get-go as a young child from the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, informs in a soft voice-over how one night 17 children left their suburban homes at exactly 2:17 a.m. and, holding their arms out like birds about to take flight, ran into the night and vanished. There’s a liberating joyousness to the otherwise ominous exodus. Reveals are measured out effectively in multiple POVs: the schoolteacher (Julia Garner, “The Assistant,” “Ozark”) whose class is emptied of all but one of her students; a grieving father (Josh Brolin) who won’t give up the pursuit; the reflective principal (Benedict Wong) trying to hold the community together; the town junkie (Austin Ames) who sees all; and the troubled, lone boy from that classroom (Cary Christopher). Creepy, eerie and enigmatic, the ending is pure cathartic carnage. Reviewed Aug. 8. (Tom Meek)
On HBO Max and Amazon Prime Video.
3. “Nouvelle Vague”
Richard Linklater’s love letter to the French New Wave is driven by the unwavering, near-maniacal vision of first-time filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) shooting “Breathless” in the Paris of 1959 (the film was released in 1960) with a relatively unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and reluctant American actor Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch, “Juror #2”). Like “Sentimental Value,” the film is about a genius and their pursuit of art at all costs while exposing the foibles and flaws of the artiste under the scrutiny of the filmmaker’s lens – very meta. The script by Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent, who partnered with Linklater on “Me and Orson Welles” (2008), is spry, lean and witty. Linklater even frames it in polished black-and-white, with a 4:3 aspect ratio to invoke the look of the era. Among the many notable cinematic faces portrayed in small bits are Claude Chabrol (who, along with Truffaut, helped conceive the storyline for “Breathless”), Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, Jean-Pierre Melville, Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson (“Au hasard Balthazar”). This was a very good year for Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Dazed and Confused”); he also delivered “Blue Moon,” which is garnering Oscar talk for Ethan Hawke getting small and short as musical songwriter Lorenz Hart. Reviewed Nov. 13. (Tom Meek)
On Netflix.
2. “Resurrection”
Bi Gan’s dazzling, cerebral sci-fi phantasm folds memory, myth and cinematic form into a single, dream-logic tapestry. Set in a future in which humanity has traded the ability to dream for immortality, “Resurrection” follows the last remaining “deliriant” (Jackson Yee), a Frankenstein-like being still capable of dreaming, and the woman (Shu Qi) tasked with entering his subconscious to retrieve buried truths. What unfolds is an episodic odyssey through visions shaped by Chinese history, genre homage and shifting perspectives. It’s a visually sensual smorgasbord told in chapters aligning with a different sense and narrative style – we begin with German expressionism and wind up with one of the most stunning long shots ever projected on a screen. It’s bathed ominously in languid red and takes place in a trash-strewn, cyberpunk part of the city that hosts a vampire lair where a young punker (Yee again, who plays five roles – one per sense) has come to profess his love for a mercurial chanteuse (Gengxi Li). It’s a bold, poetic nightmare that resonates with humanity and wonder. (Tom Meek)
Coming soon.
1. “One Battle After Another”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” is without a doubt the movie of the moment, its tale of righteous revolutionaries battling fascist troops in American city streets perfectly attuned to the fraught tenor of 2025. Even if it had arrived in less troubled times, “One Battle” would stand as a furiously funny action masterpiece. Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro all deliver career-best supporting turns (del Toro’s “few small beers” is an instant classic line read), and Anderson stages the mounting tension with laser precision, building to the best car chase since “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015). At the film’s heart is the tender relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio’s aging revolutionary wastoid and his tough-as-nails daughter (sparkling newcomer Chase Infiniti), at once an apologia for the elder generation’s failings and a call to keep fighting at all costs. To quote another line from del Toro: “No fear! Tom fuckin’ Cruise!” Reviewed Sept. 26. (Oscar Goff)
Available on demand.
A stronger
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