Every year, when it’s time to make my end-of-the-year list, I realize there are still too many new releases that I’ve yet to see, which is somewhat ridiculous since I actually managed to catch around 150 movies from 2025. That’s plenty.
With all the new shows I tried to catch, I once again failed to make any new friends or go on many hikes, but I still had a wonderful time expanding my brain into several new and strange directions. So, with that said, let’s look at the Best TV shows and movies I watched in 2025. Explore at your own discretion.
Televisual Excellence
Most of these shows I watched on one streaming service or another, but life has conditioned me to call them TV shows and not Streaming Content, so here we are. A few shows I really enjoy haven’t had their season finale yet, so I suppose they could completely fall apart by then, but I doubt it. Most of these people are professionals. Here are the six best shows (and some outliers) that I watched in 2025:
I Just Can’t Even With This Show: The Studio.
Most Disappointing New Seasons: Only Murders in the Building and The White Lotus.
Most Underrated New Season: The Bear.
Worst in Show: All’s Fair. (You know I’m right.)
Honorable Mentions: Task, Common Side Effects, The Rehearsal, The Lowdown, Long Story Short, Alien: Earth, Paradise and Death By Lightning.
Favorite Shows of the Year
The Chair Company—This won’t work for everyone, but if you’re attuned to the very specific comedic wavelength of Tim Robinson and team, you’ll find this absurdist Lynchian comedic conspiracy thriller to be a work of boundless imagination (and endlessly quotable non-sequiturs).
Andor: Season 2—By making the Empire a coldly cruel bureaucracy, it becomes scarier than it has ever been. Andor proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Star Wars doesn’t need space wizards to be iconic and important.
Severance: Season Two—The rabbit hole of this show just keeps going deeper and I can’t wait to see where it ends. Unpredictable in the best ways.
Pluribus—After Vince Gilligan blessed us with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, he earned our trust. Luckily, Pluribus sees him working on a grand canvas that beautifully balances science fiction, comedy and powerfully dramatic character work. Worth subscribing to AppleTV just for this and Severance.
The Pitt—Noah Wyle gave my favorite performance on TV this year with such a lived-in and nuanced portrait of an emergency room doctor suffering from PTSD and heaps of trauma. Fifteen absolutely unmissable hours of television and I can’t wait for season two.
Best in Show
Adolescence—Four hours, four unbroken takes following the arrest of a 13-year-old boy for the murder of a female classmate. Genuinely important and timely, Adolescence carries lesson after lesson in how to treat our children. A mesmerizing work of art.
Cinematic Excellence
I wanted to write a Top Ten and failed because too much sweet cinematic goodness was left behind, so then I tried for a Top 15, but I realized that there were a few more movies I needed to mention. Honestly, 2025 is one of the best years we’ve had in cinema for quite some time (maybe since 2007), so I made a Top 20 that I feel pretty good about, and no one can stop me.
Top 20 Movies of the Year
20. Bring Them Down—An intense and anxiety-inducing dramatic thriller about neighboring sheep farmers feuding over a pair of stolen rams. Featuring two stunning performances from the always excellent Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan, this is Irish Shepherd Neo-Noir at its very best.
19: The Phoenician Scheme—I know it’s not as cool to love the work of Wes Anderson as it used to be, but if one actively engages with his work instead of just focusing on the aesthetic surface pleasures, you’ll find that each of his movies has fathoms of emotional depth mostly undiscovered by audiences. A lot is going on in Anderson’s movies aside from the color palette and production design, I swear. Also, Michael Cera is perfect in this.
18: The Assessment—Achieves the true purpose of crafting speculative stories by giving us a hypothetical future that feels at once alien and inevitable. Filmmaker Fleur Fortuné is one to keep an eye on, as some of the shot compositions in this truly feel like they’re moving cinema forward into uncharted waters.
17: The Life of Chuck—I don’t begrudge anyone who thought “The Life of Chuck” was overly sentimental or solipsistic, but Mike Flanagan’s gentle fable on the importance of each human life worked on me like a balm to the soul. In today’s ugly times, Chuck brought a little bit of goofy beauty to the table.
16: Die My Love—Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay made one of my favorite films of all-time with Morvern Callar and this is her on that same, deeply idiosyncratic wavelength, making a movie about mental illness, motherhood and marriage in a disturbing phantasmagoria that only she could conjure. I don’t know if I like this movie, but I know I’m not done with it.
15: Bugonia—Yorgos Lanthimos makes movies that speak to me because my brain is filled with fish-eye lenses and Dutch angles just like his, but Bugonia somehow manages to not only be his weirdest movie to date, but also his most accessible. Emma Stone literally gets better with every performance and I’m not sure we’ve remotely seen what she has in store for us.
14: Rabbit Trap—Dev Patel, Rosy McEwan and Jade Croot are absolutely flawless in this revisionist bit of folklore that most critics and audience members found boring or weird. Personally, no film in history has ever given off better lo-fi, Welsh faerie folk vibes and I’m completely here for it. It will eventually gain a massive cult following of people I want to be friends with.
13: Hamnet—This could have been emotionally manipulative misery porn, but instead it’s a psychologically searing tear-jerker that re-contextualizes Hamlet against the backdrop of a deeply mourning pair of star-crossed lovers. None of this movie plays without the hauntingly empathetic eye of director Chloé Zhao and the career-best work from Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.
12: Black Bag—Steven Soderbergh makes his best movie in years with this swooningly romantic spy thriller shot through with so much restless grace as to remind audiences that movies for grown-ups not only still exist, but can thrive in the right hands. My favorite onscreen marriage of the year.
11: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You—Featuring a fearless performance from Rose Byrne and tonally ambitious work from director Mary Bronstein, Legs is suffused with the anxious intensity of something like Uncut Gems, but then concentrated onto the overwhelming brutalities of motherhood. I don’t begrudge anyone who found this one overly oppressive, but the glimmer of hope at the end left me feeling optimistic and, surprisingly, touched.
10: Sinners—Michael B. Jordan is revelatory as twin brothers Smoke and Stack in this horny vampire tale set in the Jim Crow South. But the effortlessly cool direction of Ryan Coogler and the grimy, sweaty blues score from Ludwig Göransson steal the show. A popcorn blockbuster the way Hollywood used to make them.
9: Sentimental Value—Cinema with a capital C, Joachim Trier channels Bergman in this powerful attempt to bridge the gap between fathers, daughters and the silences between them. This will win some serious Oscars and deserves every one…even if just for the final scene alone.
8: Eddington—2025’s most misunderstood film isn’t just an uncomfortable and irritable look at the individual miseries of 2020, but a sunburned fit of anger structured around a hilarious revisionist western, then nervously imploded into an Ari Aster panic attack. Long after I’m dead, Eddington will be taught alongside Network and Strangelove as one of the pinnacles of cinematic satire.
7: Blue Moon—The most I’ve loved a Richard Linklater film in ages, Blue Moon feels like an unhinged and painfully romantic play that sprung to life in front of you while you’re trying not to drink your fifth gin & tonic at your favorite speakeasy. At turns life-affirming and mordantly sad, Ethan Hawke is so damn good in this that it feels like watching a genius piano player finally letting you see how he moves his hands across the keys.
6: Weapons—The most fun I had in a theater all year. Unpredictable and insane while walking a razor-tipped tightrope between popcorn entertainment and thought-provoking seriousness. Both breathtaking and awe-inspiring, Weapons reignited that feeling in me of being drunk on the freedom and limitlessness of cinema.
5: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl—Not enough people have seen this anguished wail for the generations of women who’ve lived entire lives without a solitary moment of agency. What makes Guinea Fowl a masterpiece is that it isn’t just a lament for the women bent and broken by a thousand-years plus of the patriarchy. It also functions as a shout of alarm for young women to burn these customs to the ground before spending a life chained by them. Cinema as righteous protest and rage-fueled fury.
4: No Other Choice—Park Chan-wook is one of the best to ever do it and “No Other Choice” sees him at his most deliciously cynical, dipping his toes into slapstick comedy, pitch-black satire and white-knuckle thriller with the ease he has shown as a technical master for decades. This is Park’s Fargo and I can’t recommend it enough.
3: Cloud—What happens when your online life shows up at your door, angry and armed? Kiyoshi Kurosawa is one of the world’s finest living filmmakers and Cloud is one of his best. Quiet, contemplative and then explosive, it’s a film of such deceptively simple power that I’m not sure this shouldn’t have been my #1 movie of the year. This is now one of the standards I’ll use when I call a movie a “masterpiece.”
2: Train Dreams—Denis Johnson was one of the greatest writers to have ever lived and Train Dreams was his perfect ode to America. Clint Bentley turns that lovely story into a poem for the Pacific Northwest that radiates a gentle beauty into the soil of an America long past. Joel Edgerton is without equal as a quiet logger in the early 19th-century, but it’s William H. Macy who does so much with so little, crafting the soul of Arn Peeples, my favorite character of the year, with a limitless grace.
1: One Battle After Another—An action movie, a family drama, a can of pepper spray to the face of ICE and a fist fight at dawn, One Battle is a singular work of art from Paul Thomas Anderson, a great American provocateur. One of the very few films I’ve seen that can be labeled as perfect: from the never better DiCaprio, the infuriatingly hilarious Sean Penn and the immediately iconic Benicio del Toro and his few small beers, there is no other film on this list that I will watch more or love as deeply.
Big Movies I Missed
Marty Supreme, It Was Just an Accident, Secret Agent, Nouvelle Vague, Sirāt, The Testament of Ann Lee, Resurrection, Peter Hujar’s Day, Pillion, The Voice of Hind Rajab, Avatar 3 and The Chronology of Water. I will have seen these before the Oscars.
The Next Best Thing Awards
Special achievements in excellence for films that didn’t make the Top 20.
Best Movie That I’ll Never Watch Again—The Plague. The most potent film about bullying and the ugliness of adolescence I’ve seen since Bully. I can’t wait to see what filmmaker Charlie Polinger has in store for us next.
Favorite Debut—Alexi Wasser’s Messy is at turns a hysterical cringe-fest and a brutally honest look at being desperately in love with love. Three years from now Wasser will be in the same league as Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig…but much funnier.
Favorite Scene of the Year—Wake Up Dead Man. Easily the best of the three Knives Out films, while still being the least “fun” of them all, Wake Up Dead Man carries within its 145-minute runtime my favorite scene put on screen this year. NO SPOILERS: If I witness a finer moment than the one between Josh O’Connor and Bridgett Everett, you will know because I will have drowned in my own tears.
Immediate Auteur—Eva Victor. While I had minor issues with how Sorry, Baby wrapped up, Victor, as writer/director/star, is absolutely unforgettable. She’s going to be huge.
Worst Movie By a Director I Love—I’ve been a fan of Luca Guadagnino since 2015’s A Bigger Splash, but his work on After the Hunt feels out of touch, inauthentic and populated with characters nearly unrecognizable as human. Ayo Edebiri was done so dirty here.
Runners Up—Friendship, The History of Sound, Eephus, Better Man, Ugly Stepsister, Universal Language, Together, Bring Her Back, Bring Them Down, Grand Theft Hamlet, Superman, Mickey 17, Vulcanizadora.
Kelly Vance’s Top 10
Based in the Bay Area, longtime film critic Kelly Vance (whose work is published in Metro) says, “I’d call 2025 a strong year for intelligent, narrative-driven films—with a thorough sprinkling of political comment.” He lists the following as his top 10, but in no particular order. The final movie, Brother Verses Brother, is a flavorful indie short featuring a pair of musician brothers free-associating out loud as they wander in and out of bars in SF’s North Beach.
Orwell: 2 = 2 = 5
One Battle After Another
Hedda
The Secret Agent
Nuremberg
Eddington
It Was Just an Accident
No Other Choice
Marty Supreme
Brother Verses Brother
