From One Battle After Another to Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, Sirāt to Pillion, here’s Redmond Bacon and Jared Abbott’s picks for the best films of the year.
10 Best Films 2025
Sketches
Sweet and earnest dives into the bowels of cinema.
Cult Classic Twin Cheeks: Who Killed The Homecoming King? Finally Reemerges From Its Camcorder Swamp
Kelly Hughes’ long-unavailable and unique queer outsider artwork Twin Cheeks: Who Killed the Homecoming King? finally makes its way back into the public eye.
A Diamond on The Hudson
Craig Brewer’s Song Song Blue is a surprisingly powerful musical biopic that rests upon the remarkable easygoing charm of Kate Hudson.
Keeper Away
Osgood Perkins’ lazy “cabin in the woods” horror Keeper is a tale about almost nothing at all, with almost nothing to enjoy.
Fall From Humanity Itself
Joan Chen’s May-December romance Autumn in New York may look pretty, but make no mistake: this movie is godawful.
La criatura. Fleeing Fascism Through Zoophilia.
Made during Spain’s transition to democracy, La criatura is a fascinating time capsule that uses bestiality to represent the possibility of change.
Black Phone 2. Hell’s Frozen Over.
Scott Derrickson’s marginally better sequel Black Phone 2, the spirit of Dante’s Inferno is chanelled to frosty — in both senses of the word — results.
“Men have a lot to learn from women” — João Rosas on The Luminous Life
The Luminous LIfe director João Rosas discusses using cinema as cartography and charting the life of the same child through different films.
John Garfield: The Father of Method Acting
Films by Gena Rowlands and John Garfield at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival show us the deep emotional power of the method acting approach.
Videoheaven Lovingly Resurrects a Lost World
Over the course of three hours, Alex Ross Perry knowingly charts the rise and fall of the video store, from cultural icon to modern irrelevance.