My Top 10 Favorite Films of 2025 (excluding a handful of movies I did not have time to squeeze in before making this list, mainly Marty Supreme). I've been disappointed by a number of movies this year but making this list helped me remember the great ones:

I know James Cameron would have an aneurysm at the thought of this, but a tribe of Na’vi against a Yautja would go ridiculously hard, especially if Eywa takes notice of the Yautja and sends the ecosystem after it.

https://t.co/CjNFUNMAz8

Oh man, I forgot about this web series they made as a prequel to Assassin’s Creed II. My memory of it is that it was surprisingly good for what it was, for better or worse.

Among Avatar Fire and Ash’s countless VFX triumphs, I think there’s an argument to be made that the most impressive one is the vibration pulses in the water when the Tulkun council speaks. In tandem with the sound design, that detail has stuck with me for weeks since I saw it.

One of the best characters of 2025, hands down, and one of the key reasons that The Secret Agent is one of my favorite movies of the year.

FYC Best Actress - Amanda Seyfried #TheTestamentOfAnnLee

I imagine Oona Chaplin will (understandably) get the most praise performance-wise from folks walking out of Fire and Ash, but Stephen Lang’s motion-capture performance is among the best of its kind. Between The Way of Water and this, Lang is my favorite performer in the series.

Proud to have voted and to help tally up a few categories behind the scenes (the most satisfying of which was tallying up Best International Film, I’m so glad The Secret Agent won, easily one of the best movies of 2025).

Meanwhile, the 2020s blockbuster-budgeted equivalent to something like World's End or Dead Man's Chest looks flat, cheap, and lacks 1/100th of the atmosphere Gore Verbinski conjured. I guess we really did take a lot for granted in the 2000s moviemaking wise.

I think Curse of the Black Pearl is the apex of the 2000s adventure blockbuster, I think Dead Man's Chest is mostly decent, and I think World's End is a total mess, but JESUS CHRIST you can see where the fucking money went in those sequels.

One of the odder aspects of being a film geek who grew up in the 2000s is watching people fall head-over-heels for the 2nd and 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean movies, films I remember at the time receiving mixed receptions, but are undeniably better than their 2020s equivalents.

Testament of Ann Lee getting little to no love at year’s end is a huge bummer. It’s better than most things you’ll see this year.

The greatest sin of this movie is that it has several ideas that could have been good movies on their own, but the end result of smashing all of those ideas together is an unfocused mess.

Anaconda (2025) did not work for me. There's some good comedy early on, but once the film tries to shift gears creature feature horror and jungle adventure set pieces, it is sloppily made to a distracting degree. Rarely do you see a movie this confused about its own identity.

Now seated for Anaconda (2025). Cautiously optimistic for this, it’s such a weird premise.

Some of the only good news this year just came in the form of Criterion announcing its March 2026 lineup. Fucking finally, Killers of the Flower Moon is getting a 4K release in the U.S., no longer will you have to import a copy from Italy.

This is one of the best five-movie-runs of all time. And when you factor in directing This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner is at the heart of some of my favorite movie memories in my life. I'm mortified by what I've been reading tonight. What a horrible year this has been.

The best run anyone has ever had.

Pretty bold to invoke The Raid when describing any movie, but this Tweet doesn't mention that They Will Kill You is being directed by Kirill Sokolov, the director of Why Don't You Just Die! (2018). In his hands and with Zazie Beetz as the lead, this has a lot of potential.

It has been oddly reassuring to see others freaking out about Steve Yedlin’s excellent cinematography in Wake Up Dead Man. When I saw it back in November, I couldn’t tell if others would love the look of this film as much as I did, I now feel extremely vindicated.