Counting down the movies from #15-11 on my 2025 year-end list, before getting to the top ten next week…
#15. Marty Supreme
A kinetic, confident rush of pure adrenaline that brings vivid life to 1950s New York and offers up a charismatic little shit for the ages in Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser.
#14. Train Dreams
A beautiful, meditative film that depicts a man’s entire life through poetic and often heartbreaking images, but manages to end on a note of breathtaking uplift.
Today and tomorrow I’ll list the movies at #11-20 on my 2025 year-end list, before getting to the top ten next week.
#20. Nouvelle Vague
Richard Linklater continues to cement his legacy as one of the most versatile and fascinating film directors. This loving recreation of the French New Wave movement is one of his most audaciously creative works yet.
#19. Rental Family
I just watched this film so it might benefit from recency bias, but nevertheless I found it incredibly sweet and heartwarming. Director Hikari does a beautiful job portraying modern Tokyo in ways both expected and unexpected.
Over the next two weeks I’ll count down my ten favorite movies of 2025, and tomorrow and Friday will be a quick recap of the films sitting at the 11-20 spots. So I figured I’d spend today listing some of the titles that surprisingly fell outside of my top 20.
I don’t dislike any of these films — I like some of them quite a bit — but for one reason or another they didn’t resonate with me as much as I expected based on their pedigree.
Only three of the 20 highest-grossing domestic releases of 2025 weren’t based on some sort of existing franchise, whether it was a previous film, a comic book, or (in the case of F1: The Movie) a popular motorsport league. That’s up from two in 2024, so I guess an optimist would call that progress.
The three outliers holding the torch for original cinema are Sinners, Weapons, and The Housemaid (which was based on a book, to be fair, but it’s not exactly The Fantastic Four). Let’s celebrate the horror genre for putting butts in seats for new material.
This week I’ll continue my coverage of 2025 at the movies, rounding up some of the titles that didn’t make my top ten. But first, I wanted to post about an interesting trend I noticed in last year’s films: actors playing multiple roles in the same movie.
At first it was just a few high-profile examples, but the more movies I saw the more this emerged as a real pattern. Eventually, I identified at least 16 actors doing double (or even triple) duty. I’ve broken them out by category below.
Meet Me In Montauk 