Favorite (not best!) Movies of 2025

The other day I listed my favorite TV shows of 2025. Now, I watch a lot of TV and my access to different kinds of shows is pretty varied--much more than my access to new movies. So now I'm sitting down to list my favorite new movies of the year and--y'all, it looks kind of normie. In fact, I would bet good money that the top two are on everyone's lists, in more or less the same positions. 

Ah, well. Again, these aren't my estimation of the best movies of the year--they're just the new movies I enjoyed the most. I'm certain that within the next month or so I'll watch something I missed that should be on here. This is the way it goes.

5. Superman

Turns out I'm not tired of cape flicks. I'm tired of boring cape flicks. This movie is the most Supermanly Superman movie since 1978. Director James Gunn whips together Superman: Birthright and All-Star Superman and probably dozens of other sources into an enjoyable confection.The casting is perfect, the humor is exactly measured, the heart is warm and beating. Superman is a fantasy about the possibility of goodness, and Gunn understands that fact and delivers on it.

4. Frankenstein

One day, I might put my thoughts on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein here, since it's a bit outside my professional wheelhouse. I've taught this book several times, and every time I come away convinced that [a] it's an absolutely brilliant book, one of the permanent works of English-language fiction, and [b] it's not really science fiction, and any attempt to make it such is a kind of back-projection. Shelley herself calls it a ghost story in the 1831 introduction, and that seems more likely to me. It's a work of occult literature about dabbling in the dark arts of alchemy. Victor Frankenstein isn't a mad scientist; he isn't mad at all, but if he were to be it would be more proper to call him a mad alchemist.  

It's also a novel about killing God.

Anyway, so Guillermo del Toro has wanted to adapt Frankenstein for a long time, and in 2025 he finally got to release his vision to the world. The response--particularly from Frankenstein lovers--has been somewhat mixed. Apparently word on the street was that del Toro was making a "faithful" adaptation, and what he gave us is not "faithful" in the dully literal sense that term is often meant. To some degree, it's not "faithful" in a more abstract sense--it's a Catholic movie, where Shelley was Protestant and atheist; it's a masculine movie (whatever that means) where Shelley was feminine (whatever that means); etc etc etc. And yet, it's exactly what it needed to be, which is a del Toro movie. 

Princess Weekes has done a very thorough analysis of the movie that I encourage you to check out. I'm not going into details here--it's a gorgeous movie, Romantic in the best way, Gothic in the best way. If it fumbles the ending a little, that's also to be expected; del Toro doesn't make perfect movies--he makes perfect visions. This is one of his best.

3. Wake Up Dead Man

Unlike Mary Shelley, detective stories about religious themes very much are part of my wheelhouse. I've written a whole book about the subject. And I've long entertained the theory that Rian Johnson has some Ellery Queen lurking in the back of his mind; Glass Onion feels too much like The King is Dead for it to be a coincidence (though, since I've never seen Johnson mention Queen, it's very possible that it is). So, obviously, I was ears-up when I found out that the third Benoit Blanc mystery would be an impossible crime (hi, John Dickson Carr!) with religious themes. I had, I must say, some expectations--based largely on my work on similar topics.

Johnson surprised me. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; part of what I argue in my book (here. I'll link it again for maximum exposure) is that the religious engagement of post-WWII Ellery Queen is predicated on the Jewish identity of the authors and the subtextually Jewish identity of Ellery himself. Johnson, meanwhile, is writing from a post-evangelical perspective (not a Catholic one, which I've been informed very much shows in the movie). And his crisis is not the crisis of WWII but the crisis of seeing a faith that claims to be about love disintegrating into a religion of hate (if it's Christianity, its qlippothic Christianity).

The result is not preachy or internet atheist; it's a sensitive exploration of the need for mercy in a world that often does not extend it. It's about the real miracle of spiritual resurrection contrasted to the false miracle of the impossible crime. It's about grace. It's probably my favorite of the Benoit Blanc movies and may well be the best detective movie of the past few years.

Oh, right. It's also a fair-play mystery that hides nothing. Johnson makes this look easy. It isn't, but he's just that good.

2. One Battle After Another

Here's where I start getting really normie. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our great directors, and his previous engagement with Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice, 2014) was pretty great. And if I felt that Licorice Pizza (2021) was kind of a miss, I still had hope that he would do something special here.

Reader, he did. As might be expected, this movie generated discourse, some of it good and some of it bad. I'll leave that to the discourse-mongers. What I enjoyed most about the movie was its sense of lightness; for all that it deals with incredibly heavy themes (themes that feel particularly pressing with the fascist turn the US has taken under Donald Trump and his merry band of brownshirts), One Battle After Another remains committed to a complex humanity that includes the humor of imperfection--the best people have bad impulses, while the worst have moments of passing humanity. The viewpoint character, here--played by the always-excellent Leonardo DiCaprio--is a bit of a fool, perhaps a holy one, stumbling through a world he doesn't understand. The other characters are all grotesque in various ways--this is inspired by a Pynchon novel, after all--but Anderson never loses the moral clarity needed when dealing with issues of immigration or racism. It's a difficult movie, if you want noble good guys. But it's a vital movie.

1. Sinners

If doing a couple of Marvel capeflicks is what it takes for Ryan Coogler to make something like Sinners, then I hope he never keeps making them, because Sinners is one of the great movies of the decade. It's not perfect--I actually think it flubs the ending just a bit--but it's big and ambitious and so meticulously put together. Obviously, Michael B. Jordan is great because Michael B. Jordan is always great, and here you get two of him. But the moment that blew my mind is the moment that also blew pretty much everyone else's mind: that scene in the bar when music causes past to collide into future, causes cultures to mix, introduces for a moment a sense of the holy.

This is a movie about art, about communication though art, and about the attempts to control art, to co-opt it (obviously, this too has led to discourse). It's a movie about scratching out some sense of belonging in a world that doesn't want you. It's clearly tied to multiple threads of tradition: the vampire movie (yes, From Dusk Till Dawn is in the bloodstream somewhere), but also the tradition of Black writing going back to Jean Toomer's Cane. It's an incredibly rich movie and one that will reward revisiting multiple times. 

****

Those are my five favorite new movies of 2025. Like I say, my access to new movies is a tad more limited than TV shows, so I tend to skew a bit normie in my picks. But I do think these are genuinely great movies and suspect that even if I had gotten the chance to watch more new movies they would still be somewhere in the area of my favorites.

In the next couple of days, I'll try to do a list of favorite books. These will not be 2025 books, because I read basically no new books. But they'll be good.

By the way, there's a bunch of new books in the Public Domain now. Check some of them out here.