Deadline’s Critics Pick Their Top 10 Films Of 2025
Deadline’s film critics Pete Hammond and Damon Wise reveal their Top 10 films of 2025, a list strewn with Oscar contenders and a few films that flew under the radar.
To whittle so many films down to just 10 meant that plenty of favorites hit the cutting-room floor. Missing the final edit by a whisker on Pete’s list which is alphabetical for the Top 10, he says could have made the Top 10 in any other year, were Black Bag, Weapons, The Long Walk, A House of Dynamite, Roofman, Good Fortune, It Was Just An Accident, Sirāt, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Avatar: Fire And Ash, Is This Thing On?, Train Dreams, Sorry Baby, Wicked: For Good, Marty Supreme, F1, Song Sung Blue and La Grazia.
As for Damon, just missing the cut were No Other Choice, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, Blue Moon and Nouvelle Vague (don’t worry, Pete has a place for them both), Die My Love, A House of Dynamite, The Testament of Ann Lee and Reflection in a Dead Diamond.
Here are their respective Top 10s (Pete’s is alphabetical). See if you agree with their picks — and let us know either way in the comments.
Pete Hammond’s Top 10 Films Of 2025
Bugonia
Yorgas Lanthimos’ darkly fun and sinister movie was satire of the highest form and a dandy comeback for the filmmaker after the rather dreary Kinds of Kindness in 2024. With an exceptional performance by Emma Stone as a corporate CEO kidnapped and held hostage by a next-level Jesse Plemons as a wacko conspiracy theorist who is convinced she is an alien sent to earth to do bad things, this was based on a little known South Korean sci fi movie, but here with a sharp Will Tracy script is deliciously fun to watch.
Frankenstein
Guillermo del Toro has had a driving passion to make his own version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein since he was 11 years old. That he got to do it on a sumptuous and grand scale you rarely see in movies today, and that it was produced with such lavish care and craftsmanship, makes you long for the kind of movies Hollywood used to be interested in. Oscar Isaac as an obsessed Victor Frankenstein, and especially Jacob Elordi as the misunderstood Creature deliver exceptional performances in a movie that also speaks to the age of AI in a way that warns us about losing control and to be careful what you wish for.
Hamnet
Chloé Zhao’s meticulously realized film adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel surmises just what the creative force was behind the writing of William Shakespeare’s greatest masterpiece Hamlet and what the family tragedy might have been that triggered it and the crisis in his own marriage. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal bring this story to life with such emotional force that by the end you simply won’t know what hit you.
Jay Kelly
Noah Baumbach may have set this story in the heart of the movie business, but its tale of the toll taken on how much you may have personally missed for the sake of your career is truly universal. George Clooney, as a superstar struggling with his past and present, has never been better, and that also goes for the sensational supporting cast including Adam Sandler as his manager, Laura Dern as his publicist, and Billy Crudup as a fellow young actor who got lost in his shadow.
Nouvelle Vague/Blue Moon (tie)
The ever-creative and ambitious Richard Linklater served up two films from different sides of the entertainment universe, and both shined bright. Nouvelle Vague examines to world of the French New Wave with the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless in 1959, while Blue Moon focused on the breakup of the songwriting duo Rodgers and Hart in one memorable night after the opening of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s seminal Oklahoma. Ethan Hawke’s memorable portrayal of Lorenz Hart is one for the ages. Both films delightfully show off Linkater’s ever-unpredictable and endlessly varied filmography.
Nuremberg
Not content just to rehash events we already saw in masterful films like Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Oscar-winning Judgment at Nuremberg, this historical film from writer-director James Vanderbilt focusing on the cat-and-mouse game between an Army psychiatrist and Nazi kingpin Hermann Göring and other Nazi leaders is remarkably prescient even today eight decades later. Both Rami Malek and a perfectly cast Russell Crowe are unforgettable, as is a sterling group of actors including Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant and Leo Woodall. You may know what happened, but you will still be on the edge of your seat.
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson manages to top himself with this pulsating, funny and thrilling story of a washed-up revolutionary who has to summon everything he thought he lost in order to save his daughter. At once political, exciting, satirical and everything in between, this is another career high point for Anderson as well as the sterling cast he has collected to tell this riveting tale including Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall and newcomer Chase Infiniti.
Rental Family/Kokuho
Two very different cultural touchstones in two very different movies with Japanese themes. Rental Family is a warm and engaging English-language movie starring Brendan Fraser as a struggling actor who takes a job in Tokyo at a rental agency who supplies people to act as companions and other roles for those in need, a true thing in Japan where loneliness is pervasive. Kokuho is a stunning film about the rivalry of two young men competing to become the next great star of Kabuki theatre. Japan’s official Oscar entry is an epic achievement on every level.
Sentimental Value
Norway’s official Oscar entry is a family story about finding a way back after losing touch as two sisters deal with their estranged filmmaker father who shows up with a script he has written for the older daughter to star in. Stellan Skarsgård, Renate Reinsve and a marvelous cast find regrets, anger, connections, forgiveness and rebirth in Joachim Trier’s Cannes-winning masterpiece of the human experience.
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s dazzling period piece follows gangsters Smoke and Stack as they return from the big city to the small Southern town in which they grew up, hoping to open a nightclub. Mixing genres including vampire movies believe it or not, this reaches deep into the Black experience and the musical world of the blues to create an entertainment like no other. Exquisitely crafted in every way and featuring a sensational cast including dual roles for Michael B. Jordan, this was the year’s first great movie, and it still holds up.
Damon Wise’s Top 10 Films Of 2025
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s fourth feature is, at least to me, his most perfect yet, in that it spins so many stories under the guise of telling just one. Like Walter Salles’ 2024 barnstormer I’m Still Here, it’s about being in the thick of Brazil’s military dictatorship, but it’s just as much about the movie landscape of 1977, when a young cineaste, presumably of Filho’s age or under, could sneak into the likes of Jaws, The Omen or local hit Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. The filmmaking, likewise, draws on so many influences, including the heat-stroke aesthetic of exploitation cinema (a dead man’s leg even goes on the rampage), but Filho weaves everything together in a surprising and very sophisticated way that serves to platform Wagner Moura’s soulful performance as a college teacher forced underground and pursued by the sleaziest of hitmen.
Sound of Falling
This is the only film on the list (so far) that I’ve seen more than once. Making her Cannes Competition debut with only her second film, Germany’s Mascha Schilinski has made a film to revisit and revisit, an immersive rush that operates largely on an instinctual level. Time goes out of the window in this film’s company, as the lives of four (or is it five?) young girls overlap and intertwine over the course of a century. David Lynch is an easy comparison as far as creating such abstract moods go, but Sound of Falling is the visual equivalent of listening to a cool Brian Eno album: You’re in the know and in the dark.
Sentimental Value
It’s beginning to seem as if Joachim Trier couldn’t make a bad movie if he tried, and this year he made a great one. Ditching the austere chapter-to-chapter format — an affectation that has infected independent cinema worldwide since his namesake (and distant relative) Lars von Trier’s heyday — this Trier’s film is a way more approachable father-daughter story, in which a faded European auteur tries to make amends for being a deadbeat, arty dad. The magnetic yet combustible combo of Stellan Skarsgård and Renate Reinsve is one for the ages. Ingmar Bergman will be turning in his grave.
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson landed with such a bang, it’s hard to remember a world before Boogie Nights (yes, I know the first one was Hard Eight, and, yes, I refuse to call it anything but Sydney). Even though I’ve liked everything of his since, with the exception of There Will Be Blood, One Battle After Another is the first to recapture that lightning, notably (for me) by using Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” in a way that recalls Magnolia’s use of Supertramp. Like a lot of my favorite films this year, it evokes the ’70s, in that it’s about where your beliefs take you and where they leave you — sometimes high and dry.
Eddington
Ari Aster’s film is about everything, and that’s what did it. It premiered in Cannes, a festival where — almost — every reviewer is expected to deliver IMMEDIATE JUDGMENT! But Eddington is too much for that, a salty satire that’s so far ahead of its time that its reckoning will come many, many years in the future. For most people, the Covid lockdown was an aberration, a blip now in the past, but under Aster’s scrutiny it becomes a kind of malevolent big bang but in reverse, unraveling decades of progress and setting up a dystopic future filled with fake news, AI slop and data mining.
Train Dreams
The omega to Eddington’s alpha, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a wistful reverie about the past, in which Joel Edgerton’s stoic rural logger watches the 20th century unfold from the outside as he struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife and child. Terrence Malick inevitably comes to mind, but Slovakian director Dušan Hanák’s 1972 documentary Pictures of the Old World is a better comparison, a study of loneliness, life in the margins and people he describes as not having been “deformed by civilization.”
Sinners
It’s funny to see Ryan Coogler’s film described as unique when it borrows so much from Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. But Coogler borrows that premise — more of a glorified B-movie mash-up — and takes it in a way more interesting direction, drawing on the layered histories of blues and folk to the extent that it might even be the best use of music in a horror since The Wicker Man, notably Jack O’Connell’s rendition of “Rocky Road to Dublin.” It wouldn’t work, however, without Coogler’s flawless Depression-era world building and two indelible performances by Michael B. Jordan as twins.
The Mastermind
Josh O’Connor gave one of the year’s best performances in the Knives Out threequel Wake Up Dead Man, but Kelly Reichardt’s superb Bressonian drama is a more subtle display of his less-is-more style of acting. Set in the beige, modernist world of small-town Massachusetts circa 1970, The Mastermind doesn’t so much tell a story as simply unravel, much like O’Connor’s character, struggling architect James Mooney, when his plan to pull off the most bourgeois of crimes — art theft — goes spectacularly awry. With echoes of Reichardt’s Night Moves, it’s both distinctively and indirectly political, perhaps even a dry comment on the complacency of middle-class draft dodgers.
Sirāt
East meets West at 120 bpm in Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s apocalyptic road movie, which begins with the mother of all raves in the vast expanse of the Moroccan desert. Dealing with the bigger questions in life — about who we are and where we’re going — Laxe puts reality on the back burner so that we can only wonder what’s going on in the outside world. Instead, like the techno-infatuated road warriors helping Sergi Lopez’s Luis find his missing daughter, we succumb to the portentous beat-beat-beat of hell’s own sound system and a driving, heart-racing score meticulously sculpted by Kangding Ray.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
The title alone of Mary Bronstein’s movie is a bold and very apt statement of intent, since mood takes precedence over meaning in this surreal and often very spiky character piece. Like a great lost ’70s movie in the vein of Diary of a Mad Housewife, it’s hard to summarize, since everything and nothing happens, most of it revolving round a mysterious hole in the ceiling. But the special effect is Rose Byrne’s dazzling work as a mother at her wits’ end, dealing with a sick daughter in the absence of her military husband Charles — a part played, in a sublime coup de casting, by Christian Slater.
View this article at Deadline.
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