My favorite movies of 2025

Plus 11 honorable mentions

This was a borderline catastrophic year for Hollywood as a business, but I thought it was actually quite a good year for movies as an art form.

To start with the catastrophe, though, after years of being hobbled by a global pandemic and the aftershocks of strikes, 2025 was supposed to be the year that the movies were “back” as a business. But the box office remained weak. It’s clear that it’s just becoming much harder to sell people movie tickets as the competition not only from streaming but from short-form video becomes ever more intense.

Still, a lot of this is self-inflicted.

This year we saw decent box-office sales for a Jurassic Park movie, three Marvel movies, a Mission: Impossible movie, and a Wicked sequel, all of which (except for Thunderbolts) were considered disappointing quality-wise relative to their predecessors. And if you look at Thunderbolts in isolation, $190 million domestic for a comic book movie that doesn’t feature any major characters is very much the essence of the Marvel Cinematic Universe magic. The problem is that your Captain America and Fantastic Four movies are supposed to be monster smash hits, which is getting hard to pull off when people say the movies are bad. Superman, which was actually good, made way more money.

That said, there’s no getting around the fact that nine years ago Batman v Superman made slightly less money domestically and dramatically more money internationally than Superman did this past summer — and that’s without adjusting for inflation.

“Make good movies rather than bad ones” is good advice, but the headwinds are clearly strong.

Artistically, though, I think 2025 offered a fair amount to like, including in movies that, if not gigantic hits, were at least widely seen. It’s also worth saying that surely way more people have seen Train Dreams thanks to its acquisition out of Sundance by Netflix than would have seen even the most well-regarded festival movie on the arthouse circuit 30 years ago. People are still making and seeing great stuff even as the economic foundations are shaking. These were my favorites.

1. One Battle After Another

The fact that Warner spent so much money on this that it was a commercial failure even though it’s also by far the biggest hit of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career is just a reminder that not only are art and business different things, but so are business and popularity.

But this is a great film that I think people will love for years.