Continuing my countdown of last year’s best films…
Best Films of 2025
#7. Weapons
Zach Cregger’s 2022 Barbarian was an easy top ten entry for me — a twisty delight, alternately nerve-wracking and hilarious. It made me an instant fan, eager to see what he would deliver next.
The answer is another twisty delight, alternately nerve-wracking and hilarious. Weapons is broader and more ambitious than Barbarian but it serves up the same intoxicating blend of mystery, humor, scares, and catharsis.
Continuing my countdown of last year’s best films…
Best Films of 2025
#8. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc whodunit is a great example of how streaming dilutes the cinematic experience. While I’m sure a ton of people watched this on Netflix between loading the dishwasher and taking out the trash, it doesn’t have the cultural footprint of a movie that plays for a couple of months in theaters.
Given a proper theatrical release, I bet this movie would have had the same water cooler appeal of the 2019 original. And I bet Glenn Close would have been on her way to that elusive Oscar.
Continuing my countdown of last year’s best films…
Best Films of 2025
#9. The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson is often criticized for making the “same movie” again and again. It’s a lazy attack that ignores how decidedly different the plots and settings of his movies are from each other. If you synopsize his films, you’ll find he has written about a wide range of topics with milieus that include a private school, a research ship, a 1930s hotel, a New Yorker-like magazine, a Japanese canine encampment, a New England island, and a train through rural India.
What those critics mean is that Anderson’s style doesn’t change, and for the most part that’s true. His early films were a bit looser than the diorama-like productions he has staged since 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. But even those efforts had the same fastidious composition, deadpan delivery, and ingenious production design of his later work.
Over the next two weeks, I’ll offer up my top ten movies of 2025.
If you’ve been reading my posts from the last few weeks you probably have an idea of which films will show up here. But in these entries, I’ll spend a little more space explaining why.
Best Films of 2025
#10. Roofman
This movie stubbornly held on to the #10 spot on my year-end list even as more obvious options came and went. Sometimes you just want to see charismatic actors doing nuanced work in the service of a great yarn, and that is sadly in short supply these days.
The week of March 1, 1986, found the pop rock band Mr. Mister atop the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Kyrie.’ It was their second #1 hit, following ‘Broken Wings’ a little more than a year earlier.
Those were the first two singles from the band’s sophomore album, Welcome to the Real World. The following single, ‘Is It Love,’ peaked at #8 in July of 1986, giving this album a presence on the chart for a few months short of two years.
Meet Me In Montauk 