Let’s be honest, 2025 has been a rough year so far. Financial strife, international conflict, and relying on a Charli XCX song from five years ago are some of the many low points of this quarter century crisis. Maybe that’s why the world needed movie theaters now more than ever, either as a true hub of escapism or an eye-opening portal into someone else’s life. We’ve still got a long way to go this year but before we brace for the second half, let’s look back at our picks for the best movies of 2025…so far.
Sarah G. Vincent – Sinners
Who knew that a horror musical set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi with a predominantly Black cast would be the ninth highest grossing film in 2025 and the only movie that is not a sequel, an adaptation, part of a franchise or made in China? Ryan Coogler has never made a bad movie and seems to be getting better as an auteur even with continued commercial success; thus, proving that there is life after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Moviegoers came for the vampires and Michael B. Jordan playing twins, but stayed for a compelling American epic centered around Sammie (Miles Caton) and his struggle to stay true to his gift as a griot who tells stories through music and maintains an ancestral connection to the past and future. Forces seek to exploit Sammie, whether it’s his Bible thumping father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) during the day or a fourth century Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) at night. However, his cousins Smoke and Stack (Jordan), hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and a tormented fellow griot musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), protect and reassure Sammie that his gift is not evil. With that, Sammie finds the narrow path to salvation, life, and freedom through the darkest night of his life.
Sinners has dominated the collective imagination of everyone who saw it and has birthed a new generation of people consuming and participating in film analysis, which is not the usual side effect of crowd-pleasing blockbusters. With Sinners now streaming at home and a physical release now available, that fervor will likely spread to anyone unable to see it in theaters and turn fans into evangelists ready to force their closest friends and family into seeing it. Just make sure that when they visit, they don’t need a formal invite to cross your threshold.
Honorable Mention – On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Jon Negroni – The Ballad of Wallis Island
A windswept, wildly funny ode to failed duos, folk music, and emotional messiness, James Griffiths’s genre-defying comedy The Ballad of Wallis Island hits all the right notes. Anchored by a hilariously unhinged Tim Key as a lottery-winning recluse determined to reunite his favorite defunct folk band for a private concert, the film unfolds like a sea shanty composed by Wes Anderson and sung by John Carney.
But beneath its quirky charm and suspiciously chunky chutney lies a deeply affecting story about ego, regret, and the longing to connect. Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden crackle as ex-bandmates whose chemistry simmers with unresolved tension, while Akemnji Ndifornyen’s bird-watching husband quietly steals scenes. The humor is sharp but never cruel. The emotions real but never overwrought. Think laugh-out-loud absurdity with a side of slow-burn, aching catharsis.
Equal parts concert film, therapy session, and seaside farce, The Ballad of Wallis Island effortlessly sneaks up on you, where you’re weeping one minute and howling the next. Folk yeah, it belongs on this list.
Honorable Mention – Sorry Baby
Allyson Johnson – Viet and Nam
Trương Minh Quý delivers a stunning yet heartbreaking portrait of boundless intimacy in the evocative Viet and Nam. Shot on beautiful 16 mm, the film burrows its way under our skin, just as its protagonists finds every nook to escape to, every hollow of each other’s body left unclaimed. A film that deals with the haunting of both the past and present, our two leads seemingly doomed from the first claustrophobic scene until the last, it lingers like the coal that coats Thi Nga Nguyen and Daniel Viet Tung Le’s skin. As the two seek answers about their past while looking for brighter, well-lit futures, the tragedy of it all sweeps over us.
The film is a work of art, from its understated direction and patience to the lush cinematography that finds beauty in even the darkest, dampest shots. There’s no hope, but there’s beauty and the bond between the two lovers that make us search for it anyway.
Honorable Mention – Eephus
Jon Winkler – The Wedding Banquet
There are way too many remakes coming out of Hollywood nowadays, but every now and then there’s a diamond in the rough. Case in point, this heartfelt and frequently funny freshening of Ang Lee’s 1993 romp of the same name. Living up to the storytelling skills of the man who made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain is a tough gig, but writer/director Andrew Ahn (Fire Island) does a damn fine job of expanding and deepening The Wedding Banquet for a modern audience.
The original Banquet followed a gay Manhattan landlord trying to marry a struggling painter so the former can keep his traditional parents unaware of his lover and she can get a green card. The new Banquet is set in Seattle, where a lesbian scientist (Kelly Marie Tran) and her partner (Lily Gladstone) are trying to start a family but can’t afford IVF. Meanwhile, her gay college buddy (Bowen Yang) and his partner (Han Gi-Chan) are at risk of breaking up when the partner’s grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) demands he joins the family business in Korea. The solution? Staging a marriage between the scientist and her buddy’s partner so he can avoid his strict grandma and pay for her IVF.
Credit to Ahn for adding modern elements to his new script, from the struggles of alternative family planning to the fears of being worthy of your partner. Ahn also doesn’t forget the core elements of the original and how deception, whether it’s to your family or to yourself, rarely leads to a clean ending. What sells it all is the impeccable cast. Tran makes a strong case for a career in drama, while Gladstone brings more charm and heartache every time she’s onscreen. Gi-Chan knows how to tug on heartstrings and holds his own with his more experienced co-stars. The real surprise is Yang, taking a big leap away from his work on Saturday Night Live for a restrained but effective performance. It’s a winning team working with one of the most tender stories you’ll see onscreen this year.
Honorable Mention – Sacramento
Yasmin Kleinbart – Bring Her Back
After their gut-wrenching take on addiction in their 2023 feature debut, Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers returned to traumatize audiences once again with Bring Her Back, a graphic and heart-breaking depiction of a mother’s grief and how far she will go to get her daughter back.
After their father dies, siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are invited to live with Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former social worker whose nurturing and eccentric personality makes for a welcoming new home. But Laura’s blatant preference for Piper and her disregard for her other foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), lead Andy to believe everything is far from perfect and that their new guardian has ominous plans for his younger sister.
Bring Her Back doesn’t shy away from the grime and gore, but its biggest strength lies in its raw, emotional depth. Family is at the film’s core, and each character’s desperate need for it is nothing short of tragic. Despite Hawkins playing a crazier version of her Paddington character, you can’t help but feel some compassion for her—even if it’s very short-lived.
Honorable Mention – KPop Demon Hunters
Will Ashton – Universal Language
You don’t need to see the Iranian Tim Horton’s in Universal Language, Matthew Rankin’s bittersweet marvel of a sophomore feature, to know that you’re a beautifully askew version of The Great White North. Still, it’s hard to remember the last time that such a familiar Canadian fixture felt so uniquely realized. Rankin’s delightfully off-beat follow-up to his charming debut, The Twentieth Century, is indebted to the likes of Abbas Kiarostami, Charlie Kaufman, and, of course, Wes Anderson. And yet, it continues to showcase our lead actor-filmmaker as a storyteller who’s comfortably beating to his own weird drum.
Balancing thoughtful themes of identity, culture, and longing with a dry, icy sense of humor that’s befitting of his snowy locales, this Winnipeg winner earns your affections from its delightfully funny first shot onward. And its softly dramatic and surrealistic beats have a bewitching quality that shows that this funny filmmaker is only continuing to expand and evolve his talents. At a time when one’s sense of self and one’s cultural identity are constantly fraught, even outside of our tense American borders, Universal Language appeals to a tender and heartbreaking humanity that makes for an enriching, powerful viewing experience for the eye, the heart, and the soul. Universal Language might be speaking to a sense of place and time that won’t be relatable to every viewer, but through the director’s lovely lens, it earns its title and then some.
Honorable Mention – Black Bag
Brogan Luke Bouwhuis – Dog Man
I took my kids with me when I watched Dog Man earlier this year My five-year-old is obsessed with the books and my three-year-old is rapidly following suit, so it seemed like an easy way to earn some cool dad points. It worked! All three of us were immediately won over by its dazzling animation and the wit and heart of its script and cast. My oldest, already a budding horror filmmaker, loved the incorporation of body horror into a family-friendly film and how that compared to body horror in other films I probably shouldn’t have let her watch.
In the months that have followed, the three of us (and my wife and my parents and the neighborhood kids and anyone else they can convince to join us) have rewatched it multiple times. And each time we end up having a conversation far deeper than I would have expected. Dog Man is not preachy by any means, yet the breadth of topics it touches on has been immense. Conversations about everything from the limits of redemption to the futility of “good cops” in systems built to prioritize police corruption are now fair game in my house. The relationship between feline supervillain Petey (Pete Davidson) and his neglectful father (Stephen Root) led to a conversation about my relationship with my family that I wasn’t expecting to have with my children for years. And that’s not even broaching the film’s exploration of identity and identity crisis, which could easily be another 300 words all by itself.
The animation is fantastic, the jokes all land, and the cast is doing some of their best work. But Dog Man‘s biggest strengths are the ones that continue to reveal themselves.
Honorable Mention – The Phoenician Scheme
Evan Griffin – Friendship
I don’t like thinking about this movie. Friendship, and its star Tim Robinson, are challenging to sell people on. There is a kind of prerequisite that comes with Tim Robinson’s style of humor and your enjoyment of this film depends entirely on whether you find his form of humor funny. I am one such individual who has seen his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave several times over. Fans of that show will encounter one another in the wild, and it unlocks some secret language that, to an outsider, appears possibly deranged.
Friendship, written and directed by Andrew DeYoung (Our Flag Means Death) thrives on Tim Robinson’s schtick, which is fuel to the fire of an otherwise bone dry comedy; an alien impression of films like The-40-Year-Old-Virgin and I Love You, Man. Paul Rudd plays a dashing, enigmatic stallion of a weatherman, coming across like a milquetoast variant of his character Brian Fantana from Anchorman. He acts as Robinson’s foil in this adult male relationship, the latter of whom does just about all the same quirky loud ranting that he does on his own sketch comedy show. The difference here, is that Robinson in the lead is doing the unhinged screaming and nonsense hyperfixation that he normally does around a movie that is treating him like the dead weight he would appear in reality.
Friendship is funny if you find Tim Robinson funny, because otherwise this may be just straight terrifying, as though it were a tragic descent into madness. I’ve never felt this level of unbearable laugh-cringe in an audience since the premiere of another Rudd comedy vehicle, Dinner For Schmucks, and I still stand by hating that movie. Friendship is still as well-made and committed to its tense atmosphere as any other A24 release of the last five years, but its barrier of entry may be high for some. For those of us already too far off the deep end, it’s hysterical.
Honorable Mention – Mickey 17
Tyler Carlsen – Thunderbolts*
In a time when Marvel’s output of products has been a bit underwhelming, Thunderbolts* was a breath of fresh air to both die hard MCU fans and casual audiences alike. While the typical superhero fight sequences and one liners still exist, this film focuses on real world human issues like mental health, finding a purpose and the complicated and messy world of politics and the media. With a cast of mostly secondary characters from other Marvel films and shows this film could have been a disaster but instead chose to be something that made you really think about life while still laying the groundwork for the bigger picture of the MCU.
Honorable Mention – Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
Justin Carreiro – Final Destination: Bloodlines
A return to Death’s design was exactly what horror audiences (and 2025) needed! Final Destination: Bloodlines was a refreshing entry in this long-dormant franchise, where many wondered if the series still had its grit and blood. Thankfully, Final Destination: Bloodlines proved that it could shock and scare its audiences while learning from its past and growing in the right direction.
After 15 years away, Bloodlines expanded on its previous sequels by balancing strong character development with blockbuster-worthy kills. The sixth entry’s story delved into the emotional weight of a family’s past sins and how Death’s premonition caused a devastating ripple effect. Through this foundation, Bloodlines fleshed out its cast, exploring nuanced relationships between the family and their complex history. These unfortunate victims felt like real people, not just hapless kills to fill the body count.
But we can’t forget about the kills, too! Intense, nerve-wracking, and deliciously cruel in all the funniest ways. Final Destination: Bloodlines is having a great time on screen, and that’ll make you have a blast with Death’s latest carnage.
Honorable Mention – Heart Eyes
