2025 Top 10

1. Hamnet (now playing in local theaters)

Sometimes nothing satisfies like a classically structured, good old-fashioned awards-friendly drama—at least when it’s as ideally executed as Chloe Zhao’s earthy and deeply moving Hamnet, adapted with Maggie O’Farrell from her own speculative historical novel about Shakespeare’s marriage and family. Never contradicting the historical record, Hamnet fills in the gaps while exploring the cavernous grief of Agnes Shakespeare and her dramatist husband, who transforms their pain into deathless art. Pair with: The Shrouds (Criterion Channel, Digital) David Cronenberg’s deeply personal, deliberately ambiguous musing on the ultimate body horrors of death and decomposition.

2. Resurrection (local theaters in January)

Few filmmakers working can rival the visual precision and dark beauty of Bi Gan’s aesthetic, which finds its apex in this sprawling science-fiction fable of infinite ambition. At once a scarcely veiled critique of authoritarianism (poking the bear of the Chinese government) and a meditation on Buddhist belief, Resurrection also serves as a tour of 20^th century film history as it makes a heartfelt plea for our continued ability to dream big, including on movie screens. Pair with: Sinners (HBO Max, Digital) Ryan Coogler’s ambitiously artful elevated-horror blockbuster that’s as meta-musical as Resurrection is meta-cinematic.

3. The Mastermind (MUBI, Digital)

Kelly Reichardt strikes again, with this highly anxious, highly amusing anti-heist thriller starring Josh O’Connor in his finest of four great performances this year. This is not your father’s The Thomas Crown Affair, but rather an insinuating genre subversion and a character study of privilege and ambition not unique to America but emblematic of it. Pair with: “Marty Supreme" (now playing), with Timothée Chalamet doing the character work as another American striver whose ping-ponging path to greatness reveals the limits of the American Dream.

4. Eddington (HBO Max, Digital, 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray)

When the arguments stop, the shooting begins in Ari Aster’s sharply scripted, deliberately maddening button pusher. Joaquin Phoenix’s alt-right sheriff squares off with Pedro Pascal’s corrupt left-wing mayor in a film that dares to go there, albeit there being 2020 at the height of covid paranoia and BLM anger. This black comedy of American division incorporates pernicious conspiracy theories, data centers, anger-fueled internet/cell-phone/talk radio culture, the masking debate, small-town American blight, and false flags to form a prism refracting the truths and lies driving us to something much worse than distraction. Pair with: No Other Choice (now playing), Park Chan-wook’s zeitgeisty, dog-eat-dog marketplace murder comedy, which plays like Kind Hearts and Coronets were it directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

5. Blue Moon (Digital)

This one’s for the show-biz nerds in the house. Richard Linklater serves up another Robert Kaplow-penned story—after Me and Orson Welles—of artistic neuroses and greatness going hand in hand. Ethan Hawke will break your heart as Lorenz Hart—half of the legendary songwriting duo Rodgers and Hart—jealously weathers the smash opening-night Broadway success of Rodgers’ collaboration with a new partner: Oscar Hammerstein III. Alive with the love of witty dialogue, this esoteric story flies by with theatrical brio. Pair with: Nouvelle Vague (Netflix), Linklater’s equally esoteric, equally thrilling recreation of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s influential debut Breathless.

6. The Oslo Trilogy: Sex/Dreams/Love (Digital)

Cheating here, but this deceptively casual, quietly ambitious trilogy of films from Norwegian writer-director—and novelist—Dag Johan Haugerud should stick together (even though each film satisfies on its own). Constructed of everyday profundities, confusions, and insecurities, the films follow well-drawn characters on humble journeys of self-discovery with no fixed destinations but plenty of conversation and relational negotiation. Pair with: Splitsville (Digital, Blu-ray), Michael Angelo Covino’s tonally opposite raucous comedy of relationships flying off the rails and the search for satisfaction…and sanity.

7. The Baltimorons (AMC+, Digital)

A balm to sooth the savage breast this year, The Baltimorons offers the pure pleasures of laughter and two relatable humans falling in love. No ordinary rom com, this indie helmed by Jay Duplass has a charm and warmth that belie its wintry setting as fresh faces Michael Strassner (who co-wrote with Duplass) and Liz Larsen banter with palpable chemistry as a meet-weird situation keeps two lonely souls hanging on (and hanging out) for more. Pair with: Oh, Hi! (Netflix, Digital), a black comedy that’s as gleefully dark about (disastrous) dating as The Baltimorons is light.

8. The Chronology of Water (local theaters in January)

In another of the year’s auspicious directorial debuts, Kristin Stewart jumps in the deep end of Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir. Through non-linear narrative, Stewart paints a distinctive and bracingly daring, boldly fragmentary and psychologically intimate portrait of a young queer woman (Imogen Poots, never better) struggling to come into her own, pursue success, and live her truth even as sexual abuse, depression, and addiction existentially threaten her. Not an easy watch, but shouldn’t be. Pair with: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Digital), a black comedy with Rose Byrne delivering one of the year’s best performances as a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

9. Sorry, Baby (HBO Max, Digital)

In a year when the headlines came to be dominated by the Epstein Files, this deeply empathetic comedy-drama (yes, comedy!) explored the upsides and downsides to womanhood under a literally rapacious patriarchy that refuses to die. Writer-director-actor Eva Victor made their directorial debut with this quirky tale of resilience, which hopefully celebrates the nurturing instinct while acknowledging the psychic scarring of sexual assault, all the while reminding us that sometimes, even in our darkest hours, we just need to laugh to stay sane. Pair with: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (HBO Max/Digital), Rungano Nyoni’s powerful diagnosis of Zambian sexism, which issues a prescription of breaking from tradition to stand up to male predation.

10. One Battle After Another (HBO Max, Digital)

Leonardo DiCaprio leads a killer ensemble in this satirical tale of the radical left pitted against the far right. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, Paul Thomas Anderson’s big-scale revolutionary adventure accidentally landed at the perfect time to reflect a year of civil-rights-violating ICE raids and skewer the moneyed white nationalism behind the New American Order. Pair with: The Secret Agent (now playing in theaters). If One Battle looks into tomorrow, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s quirky, ‘70s set political thriller offers hindsight on a Brazilian military dictatorship that keeps a set of activist political refugees on the downlow and on their toes.

More runners-up:
Misericordia, It Was Just An Accident, Peter Hujar’s Day, Sentimental Value, Hedda, Sirât, Train Dreams, When Fall Is Coming.