Rob's Favorite Movies of 2025

by Rob DiCristino

Shove your cynicism. It was a great year!

10. One of Them Days (Dir. Lawrence Lamont)

Lawrence Lamont’s feature debut is the sort of R-rated buddy comedy so low-concept that it lives or dies by the chemistry between its leads. Luckily, this one lives! The plot is simple: Dreux (Keke Palmer) is a waitress hoping to make manager. Her roommate Alyssa (SZA, in her own debut) is an aspiring artist so thoroughly dickmatized by her loser boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua Neal) that she doesn’t notice him skimming their rent money for his start-up clothing line. Now, Dreux and Alyssa have one afternoon to scrape together $1,500, taking a journey across Los Angeles that will have them sparring with corrupt payday lenders — and people they’ve destroyed, like Lucky (Katt Williams) — bloodbank nurses, unscrupulous thots (Aziza Scott), and even a local street boss (Amin Joseph as King Lolo). Foul-mouthed but sweet-natured, One of Them Days is a smart, snappy, and empathetic skewering of our capitalist hellscape as well as a delightful star vehicle for its leads. Give us five more of these, please. Another One of Them Days? Come on, man. It writes itself!

9. Sentimental Value (Dir. Joachim Trier)

There’s this great turn on The Sopranos when Tony’s therapist decides to end their sessions because she realizes that they’re fueling his sociopathy. In other words, Tony’s using therapy as a form of manipulation, another way to justify his bad behavior and relieve the anxiety that comes with it, thus making him a more effective criminal. There’s no insight or accountability; he’s just creating narratives and indulging in self-pity because, well, it’s easier than admitting he’s fucked up. I kept thinking of that storyline when watching Joachim Trier’s newest drama, an incisive look at the intersection between false narratives — in this case, the work of filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) — and self-pity — in this case, his broken relationship with his daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). While not as funny or adventurous as 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, Trier’s new film has stuck with me because it presents that dynamic optimistically: Spinning fairy tales can be healing, but only if we’re spinning them with the people we love.

8. Wake Up Dead Man (Dir. Rian Johnson)

When I was putting together that “look back at my old lists” article from last week, I realized that 2022’s Glass Onion marked the first time I’d left a Rian Johnson film off my Top Ten. To be clear, I don’t dislike his second outing with dapper sleuth Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), but I do think it’s Johnson indulging in his worst screenwriting habits: It’s too smart to be an effective drama, too period-specific to have any shelflife, and too philosophically petty to provoke genuine reflection from its audience. In those respects, this year’s Wake Up Dead Man is a tremendous return to form, an about-face through which Johnson seems to have finally learned the value of addition by subtraction. Dead Man may offer a less satisfying mystery than previous Knives Out adventures — and arguably wastes a great ensemble in the process — but in its place comes a two-pronged examination of faith: one via Blanc’s defiant intellect, and another via Father Jud’s (Josh O’Connor) gentle humanism. Despite Johnson’s gift for dialogue, that quiet scene with Jud on the phone might be the best thing he’s ever written.

7. Eephus (Dir. Carson Lund)

Speaking of simplicity, why has Carson Lund’s elegiac baseball comedy Eephus stuck with me since Adam and I first discussed it way back in the spring? Because there’s nothing simpler — nothing more elemental, really — than nine innings of America’s pastime played by folks who really love it. As I wrote in April: “While most great baseball movies try to…built around the romance of the perfect game, the glory of the home run, or the sabermetric wizardry of a championship team, Eephus celebrates the thousand-yard stare of a bored left fielder, the aching knees of an overweight catcher [and] the old-timer keeping a meticulous box score behind the plate…On and off the field, every one of them rages against the dying of the light…trying to make every pitch, every at-bat, and every inning last forever.” Do you need to love baseball to love Eephus? Maybe. But we’ve all lost something important to us. We’ve all felt time run out on a dream. We’ve all fought for a lost cause or two. For those reasons alone, Eephus is so much more than just a baseball movie.

6. Sinners (Dir. Ryan Coogler)

We talk a lot around here about how frustrating it can be when an emerging independent voice gets swallowed up by the studio franchise machine. Oh, you made a quirky, well-observed teen movie? Here’s the next Spider-Man. You did that weird Aubrey Plaza thing about time travel? Now you’re in charge of Jurassic Park. Oh, you won Best Picture for a contemplative drama about a lady pooping in a bucket? Make Marvel’s Eternals next. You get the idea. And while it’s hard to deny that Ryan Coogler’s IP follow-ups to Fruitvale Station have themselves been totemic achievements that revitalized their respective franchises, the commercial and creative success of his first original script in more than a decade is a far more gratifying achievement. With any luck, Coogler’s path will look less like Colin Trevorrow’s and more like Christopher Nolan’s, with his spectacular, genre-bending Sinners holding the “one for me” spot that Inception took between Dark Knight films. Sinners is certainly worthy of the mantle, a sensory delight that gets better with each viewing.

5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Dir. Mary Bronstein)

2025 really was the year for Women Who’ve Had Enough, wasn’t it? Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda? The list goes on and on, and Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You should be at the top of it. While plenty of character pieces wring their drama from traumatizing tragedies or horrific acts of abuse, Bronstein’s turns relatively minor inconveniences into existential catastrophes that bring Linda (Rose Byrne in one of the year’s best performances) to the edge of her sanity. It’s just a hole in the ceiling, some might argue. It’s just a daughter (Delaney Quinn) with special medical needs. It’s just a husband (Christian Slater) away on a business trip. It’s just a client (Danielle Macdonald) who left you with her newborn baby. It’s just a few days in a motel run by a super (ASAP Rocky) who wants you to buy him drugs off the dark web. But you know what? That shit adds up! Bronstein’s film empathizes with that anguish beautifully, giving hope — well, let’s say “perspective” — to all of us who’ve ever felt in over our heads.

4. It Was Just an Accident (Dir. Jafar Panahi)

Who’d have thought that the most captivating special effect of 2025 would be the gentle squeak of a prosthetic leg? It’s certainly the most haunting, anyway, a sound that represents years of heartache for the band of outlaws at the center of Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident. Inspired by years of imprisonment by his country’s authoritarian government, Panahi’s film asks a simple question: Should the servants of a brutal regime — in this case, Ebrahim Azizi as former prison guard Eghbal — be held responsible for the torture they inflict on those under their supervision? Some might say it’s an easy question to answer, but others might consider how they’d feel in Eghbal’s place. He has a wife and children, after all. He has a mother who loves him. He feels remorse for the things he’s done. Or does he? Would it matter if he didn’t? Would that make it easier to pull the trigger? Or not pull it? Panahi has his own feelings, but he’s a talented enough storyteller to present us with these impossible questions and let us come up with our own impossible answers.

3. Marty Supreme (Dir. Josh Safdie)

Well, we know which of the Safdie brothers has the talent, don’t we? I kid. I kid (I don’t). I found myself even more enamoured with Josh Safdie’s anti-sports biopic on the second viewing, more tuned into the way it weaponizes ‘80s synth pop hits — the ‘80s being the peak era (era) of American self-aggrandization in Safdie’s lifetime — and post-war Americana against a character archetype whom we’ve been taught to idealize as a symbol of our national ethos, of our dogged American ego and capability and individualism. Others have noted how Timothée Chalamet’s performance plays like a commentary on his own rise to defiant stardom — that Chalamet is “selling” himself just as hard as Marty is — and while I agree with that, I also believe there’s a Jay Kelly-esque admission of culpability in the way Chalamet presents Marty’s avarice and fear, the way he collapses on that stage after winning one of the most uninspired, pyrrhic victories in sports cinema history. There’s just so much to unpack with Marty Supreme, a film I’ll be chewing on for many years to come.

2. Sorry, Baby (Dir. Eva Victor)

“I’m sorry that bad things are going to happen to you,” Agnes (Eva Victor, who also directs and writes) tells her best friend’s newborn baby. “I hope they don’t.” It’s that exact rueful, ironic attitude toward existence that marks so much of Victor’s debut feature, itself the exact sort of deadpan tragicomedy — see Palm Springs, The Worst Person in the World, and The Banshees of Inisherin — that always manages to find itself near the top of my year-end lists. What can I say? I have a type. Maybe it’s because I’ve accepted that life will always be a mix of sweet and sour, that, as grad school professor Agnes learns as she recovers from the Bad Things that have happened to her, there’s no cosmic relief to be gained from protest or self-pity. Agnes isn’t a better person because she survived those Bad Things; she’s still just a person, but Victor’s wry, often heartbreaking screenplay chooses to celebrate the absurdity of those no-win scenarios, and supporting turns from John Carroll Lynch, Lucas Hedges, and Naomi Ackie reinforce the idea that we only weather that absurdity if we do it together.

1. One Battle After Another (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Not just the best film of the year but one of the best films of the decade so far, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is already a comfort watch in this household, a film I can check in with over the course of a long, lazy Sunday and know exactly where I am in the story without feeling lost. I can already recite so many of its best lines by heart — “Hail Saint Nick!” “A semen demon!” “Hi, prick!” “A few small beers!” — and I’m thrilled by how many of my mostly movie-phobic friends and relatives have told me they discovered it on HBO. Like 2023’s Oppenheimer, One Battle is both high and low art, a story that appeals to mainstream audiences and discerning cinephiles alike. Despite its box office failure — in fact, maybe even because of its box office failure — I’m confident it’ll be the kind of American epic that Zoomer cinephiles will one day talk about with the same reverence that guys my age talk about Goodfellas and The Shawshank Redemption. It’s a legit five-star masterpiece, and for the life of me, I still can’t believe they pulled off that rooftop fall gag.