What’s your favorite cognitive distortion? I know, it’s hard to pick, right? Mine is pretty easily “black and white thinking,” an upsetting mental fixation where everything gets sorted into either “good” or “bad” with nary a “gray area” purgatory to be found. This is weird because I remain an unrepentant Lost apologist!
I bring this all up because when I sat down to do my annual best/worst list, I found a heaping helping of both and very, very little in the middle. In part this is likely because having a strong reaction makes for more interesting writing about film. “It’s okay” is a challenge to stretch into a full review. I mean, as anyone who has read this space before knows, with enough puns and sarcastic one-liners, it’s quite doable.
But I do find it alarming that my thinking may be sliding in reductive binary simplification. My short list for best movies had 17 on it, but “worst movies” only trailed by two. We are increasingly being trained to have extreme reactions. We blame “the algorithm,” but it is only more efficiently capitalizing on innate human desires. Simple is better. A strong reaction, positive or negative, makes life easier to understand.
There’s no easy or “right” way to overcome this, but I guess I wanted to be aware of it and publicly own up to it. And now, let’s get to what you came here for, which I assume wasn’t an unpacking of my own personal mental hangups and a reflection on societies gross provocation economy.
The Worst 5 Movies of 2025
5.) Fountain of Youth – Have you ever wondered what it would be like to watch an Indiana Jones movie and root against Indiana Jones? Wonder no more!
4.) The Conjuring: Last Rites – This one is about a possessed mirror. That’s really what it is about, honest. And it takes well over two hours to tell the story of said mirror, which builds to perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious climax in ages. They fight the mirror. Physically. They physically fight a mirror.
3.) The Long Walk – Maybe the first step in holding real-world leaders accountable begins by demanding that our overtly moralizing parables do more than nebulously suggest that bad things are bad and that doing something about bad things would be good.
2.) F1 – This works as a duology (please God, no trilogy) with writer/director Joseph Kosinski’s last film, Top Gun 2: There’s Still Lead in This Pencil! I thought that movie was the most egregious massaging of the aging white male ego, but I stand corrected.
1.) Wicked: For Good – This is the first movie in as long as I can remember where I cannot think of one nice thing to say about it. Every half hour or so since I saw it, I have thought of another new thing to loathe.
The Best Movies of 2025
Before we dive into the top 10, here is an honorable mention roll call, in no particular order:
Companion – I can’t imagine who would have a bad time with this. No, wait, I can. And it actually makes me like it more.
Hamnet – This one is virtually exclusively sad. Super sad. Like, every time you see the term “sad” used to describe this film, imagine that word is wearing a cape, standing with its hands on its hips, crying.
The Assessment – This isn’t high-concept Armageddon but a bleak, soft sci-fi gem that feels like a window into the fast-approaching tomorrow. It lays out the only three possible reactions to our inevitable impending collective misery: Give up, use technology to deny reality, or walk wide-eyed into a hellscape. If you haven’t chosen which is your plan for dystopia, time is running out!
Friendship – A true Hawaiian pizza of a jokester, Tim Robinson is arguably too vehemently defended by those who find his humor delicious and remains baffling to a much wider majority. Having previously fallen into the latter group, I did not expect to enjoy Friendship. And yet, by God, the walking pineapple-ham-tomato-sauce cheeseball was somehow delicious this time. I blame Antifa.
Predator: Killer of Killers – This was somehow the best animated movie that I have seen in the last several years and among the most fun I had watching any movie in 2025. Join me. There is room on the Pred-Head bandwagon.
Mickey 17 – This was supposed to come out in March of 2024. It wouldn’t have changed anything. But watching it then would have felt more hopeful, more aspirational, than the feeling of watching it now. Now, it feels like a brutal reminder of how so many people see the world: filled with replaceable “others” consigned to suffer for convenience.
Highest 2 Lowest – Denzel Washington gets in a rap battle with A$AP Rocky, there’s a wild chase scene, and the biggest laugh in the movie involves “Jake from State Farm.” Please watch?
And now, without further ado (he says after 1000 words), my top 10:
10.) The Monkey – The Monkey is not “elevated horror.” It is not socially aware. Its biggest theme is “Uh oh, that person just exploded.” It is a legitimately hilarious, gleefully insane, brief sprint through a series of riotously funny deaths. Think Final Destination, but funny on purpose. Writer/director Osgood Perkins, who still has yet to make a single bad film, delivers unto us the perfect movie for the moment. Come, laugh at bad stuff!
9.) The Naked Gun – I am nothing if not a sucker for a guffaw and a patsy for a chortle. Being “the funniest movie of the year” used to actually mean something. Now it means you were the best of the two to three actual comedies released in a given calendar year. Good news: The Naked Gun would be the funniest movie even if you crumpled several years together.
8.) Sinners – The “point” of Sinners, a rip-snorting vampire-centric music video, is not that “human beings are the real monsters.” The point of Sinners is a stake, driven through the heart of monsters of all-kinds, fanged or not. It is also that the most important thing in life is having a good time with the ones you love and also not summoning unholy hell-beasts by playing music that is simply too good. You are safest playing bad music. So, great news, modern country music fans!
7.) Eddington – Seriously, where is the great art about the world-realigning madness we’ve been going through for a half decade now? Maybe Eddington is the first entry in that, even if it is fairly simplistic (and expectedly, delightedly weird). It’s just standing there pointing at us and asking “Hey everybody, uh, what the hell?” Good question, Ari!
6.) One Battle After Another – Either Warner Bros. has taken viral marketing to an upsetting new level or writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is a narrative Nostradamus. Because calling One Battle After Another “timely” feels like it undersells the concept of time. What is even more seemingly impossible is the fact that it fully and completely works. From frame one to the credits’ conclusion, PTA’s latest is a barn-burning riot that is somehow equal parts political thriller and screwball bananas nonsense. And everyone loves it, except for a handful of people who are really, really, really going to hate it.
5.) 28 Years Later – Boyle is the same age as George Miller was when the latter dropped Mad Max: Fury Road, and the effect is eerily similar. The films are wildly different, connected only by a post-apocalypse setting, but both feel like masters of their craft returning to the franchises that catapulted them just to show how much better they are at filmmaking now. Contrast this with Scorsese making the same machismo gangster movie with the same actors in an ever-so-slightly different setting or Wes Anderson popping off another quirk-fest so similar to his other stuff it’s like his filmography was a wet Gremlin.
4.) Wake Up Dead Man – Knives Out was good. Glass Onion was better. And Wake Up Dead Man is the best of all. The cast is crisper, the message is more meaningful, the humor is heightened, and the mystery is more meticulous. Three films in, and writer/director Rian Johnson has found a near-impossibly brisk stride and is jogging backwards, asking audiences to keep up.
3.) Weapons – It’s hard to pick the most upsetting thing happening in America right now. It’s a smorgasbord of unpleasantness, a gluttonous buffet of misery for a country with an insatiable appetite. A deep cut, “hidden gem” bit of awful is the percolating mutual distrust we have for one another. “I thought you were a better person than that” is a wildly common unspoken exchange between neighbors and loudly thunk thought at all public meetings and gatherings. Add to that the fact that “children are the future” has shifted from an optimistic outlook to something like a threat, and you get the inherent terror of writer/director Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a movie that turns everyone you know and don’t into a potential murder instrument.
2.) Predator: Badlands – If you don’t like the first 10 minutes of Predator: Badlands, a movie that features a prominent and unforgettable high-five between a hand and a foot, you are gonna hate the whole durn thing. However, if you are comfy with the words “fight sequence” and “plot” being interchangeable, butter up those brass knuckles, babies. It is, at a bare minimum, highly improbable that director Dan Trachtenberg has now squeezed three consecutive squeal-inducingly-good sci-fi spectacles out of a franchise best known for a handshake meme.
1.) Sorry, Baby – How we answer the question “are people inherently good or bad” is usually a mood ring. I haven’t found a way to get to “good” as a response in quite some time. It’s insane to say “good.” It’s impossible. Sorry, Baby got me to change my answer from “bad.” It made me stupidly realize the obvious answer is “neither.” We may be born with characteristics or circumstances that predispose to one or the other, but we have the capacity for either and both. That may not sound like optimism, but it is a hell of a change.
The problem with this review is that, if you trust me, you’re going to watch Sorry, Baby expecting it to dazzle you. Sorry, baby. It’s not that kind of movie. Too often, we expect flash and sparkle, innovation and novelty when we hear something is great or, in this case, perfect. It is flawless and genuine. It made me feel so deeply. I apologize if this builds it up too much for you. I just loved it too much to pretend otherwise.