What a weird, wild, and wonderful year 2025 has been, thus far. I cannot think of a year when, in July, I already had so many 5-star and 4.5-star films under my belt. I also cannot remember the last time I already had so many instant classics tucked away. People keep saying the box office is dead. Films like A Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch, and How to Train Your Dragon would disagree, though they are all based on existing IP. In fact, only two films not based on existing IP cracked the box office top ten for the year – Sinners and F1. So, before we get into the rundown, here are some mid-year takeaways:
*HORROR REMAINS HOT: In January, Wolf Man, Presence, and Companion all under-performed compared to expectations, but still managed to turn profits for their respective studios, while their VOD impact exceeded all expectations; February gave us the moderately successful, Heart Eyes, but also the first true horror hit of the year – Oz Perkins’ The Monkey; OK – March was a total bust, as The Woman in the Yard and Death of a Unicorn made barely a dent; as for April, it was all about Sinners – sorry, Until Dawn, but you did the best you could; Final Destination: Bloodlines crushed it in May and reinvigorated that franchise, while Clown in a Cornfield made ten times its budget at the box office; and, June was a mixed bag, delivering one of the best horror films of the year with 28 Years Later, and the crushing disappointment that was Megan 2.0. Overall, it’s been a lackluster horror year for indies like Blumhouse and A24, but a banner year for the big dogs, particularly Warner Bros.;
*SUPER HERO FATIGUE IS STILL REAL: This piece is being written the day before I see Superman, so my mind might be changed but – as for now – it sure feels like audiences have had enough of tights. Both Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* started strong, and even had legs, but still didn’t even break $200M at the domestic box office. The audience for these films has drastically shrunk;
*ANIMATION IS IN TROUBLE: It’s strange to not have a single animated film in the Top 10 of the box office for the year. Dogman did all right for Universal; Sneaks absolutely tanked, unsurprisingly; Elio decimated Pixar; and the tracking for the upcoming Smurfs musical is not stellar. There was a time when animation was as close to a sure bet as you could get, but those days are long gone. Even the live-action adaptations of animated films had mixed results. Whereas something like How to Train Your Dragon (essentially a total remake across the board) found an audience, Disney’s Snow White crashed and burned. Or maybe audiences can just see a total money grab coming from a mile away? Regardless, studios had better get more creative with their animated output. The writing is on the wall;
*LADIES AND GENTLEMEN… The Weeknd needs to just…stop. Hurry Up Tomorrow was just a God-awful vanity project from Hell. Between this film and that terrible HBO Max series, someone needs to sit Abel Tesfaye down and tell him: “You’re not Prince, you’re not Cher, you’re not Madonna, you’re not Beyonce, and you’re damned sure not Common.” Stick to what you do…well?
Now, let’s get into the films that made me incredibly happy in this, the year of Our Lord 2025…
- FREAKY TALES
From filmmaking team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Freaky Tales is unlike anything they’ve ever given us before. Gone is the grit of Half-Nelson, the sweeping emotional scope of Sugar, and the blockbuster pageantry of Captain Marvel. Here, they celebrate all things Oakland with a weird and wild anthology film that’s as punk rock as it is samurai, featuring Ben Mendelsohn at his smarmiest best, Pedro Pascal in full-on ‘silent assassin’ mode, and an unforgettable Jay Ellis playing a real-life character going ape-shit in unimaginable ways. The color palette, the costumes, the music – it all just works. It was so nice to see Boden & Fleck returning to their indie roots with this one, and I had a smile plastered on my face the entire time. It’s certainly the most fun the filmmaking duo have had with a picture, and that’s evident across every frame. All the Too $hort love, cameo included, was just icing on an already delicious cake.
- SORRY, BABY
Click Here for My Full Review of Sorry, Baby Right Here on Cinepunx
- PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF
Paul Reubens was an enigma for much of his life. A deeply private man, all most people knew of him was what they saw in his performances or assumed from his very public run-ins with law enforcement. Pee-Wee Himself is a sprawling dissection of Reubens, guided by an hours-long sit-down interview with the man himself, shot only a couple of years before he died of a secret battle with cancer, a battle not even the filmmakers knew about. That truth adds an extra layer of poignancy to the piece, as we watch Reubens continue to grapple with sharing too much of his story. The relationship between Reubens and the film’s director, Matt Wolf, makes for an interesting twist to a normal biographical documentary, and sends the finale of the piece into unexpected directions. It’s difficult not to leave the film with a tinge of sadness, knowing Reubens was never fully capable of living his life, out and proud, as his true authentic self. But there’s much joy to be found also, and that’s what Pee-Wee would want us to remember.
- PREDATORS
This is one of the more complicated watches I’ve had in a very long time. Here’s a documentary about the show, To Catch a Predator, and the ways in which they might have skirted around ethical responsibilities in order to tell their tales. I don’t think anyone dislikes the idea of pedophiles being taken off the streets and punished and treated, but I found myself feeling for some of these guys, especially after learning more about the whole system. Filmmaker David Osit, himself a victim of abuse as a child, tackles the legacy of the show as well, following some Chris Hansen wannabes as they take even more ethically dubious risks in their ‘work’. And, of course, it ends with an interview with the man himself – Chris Hansen – who has a surprisingly frank and uncompromising view of the show, his part in it, and the good he believes it has done. I was somewhat impressed with where he is with everything, even if I did leave the film conflicted. I expect everyone who watches this film will come out changed in some regard.
- THE LIFE OF CHUCK
One of the true disappointments of 2025 was the lackluster response to The Life of Chuck, one of the most soul-stirring and genre-defying cinematic experiments of the year. Director Mike Flanagan clearly poured everything he had into this Stephen King adaptation, mining the gold out of a very simple idea – “What is the life of a person truly worth?” The film, itself, has many answers, but none so profound as an act two sequence where adult Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) randomly stops next to a musician/busker on the street and just starts dancing. Flanagan also gives delicious supporting roles to folks like Mia Sara, Heather Langenkamp, Matthew Lillard, and a terrific Mark Hamill. This film had the potential to be the next Forrest Gump (and, yes, for me, that’s a great thing), but maybe society, as a whole, doesn’t want films that showcase the joys and heartbreaks of the human experience. Maybe that time has passed. Underseen and underappreciated, The Life of Chuck is something truly unforgettable, like the very best of Stephen King’s works. There’s no horror on display here – just humanity.
- PAVEMENTS
As a child of the 90s, and a lover of alternative rock, particularly under the radar stuff I only ever heard about through Spin Magazine, Pavement was a big deal for me. They were the band that automatically made you cool if you listened to them. It didn’t hurt that they wrote phenomenal songs and seemed to be counterculture in all the best ways. Pavements is a love letter to the best band that never really was, meticulously crafted by director Alex Ross Perry and woven with various fantastical threads. We get a fake biopic about the band (featuring Joe Kerry, Jason Schwartzmann, Tim Heidecker, Logan Miller, Fred Hechinger, etc.), a staged museum exhibit of the band’s career, a Broadway musical about the band, and a reunion concert. And though that might seem like a lot of balls to juggle, Perry never drops one. It all works because, at its core, it’s just a movie about a band the filmmaker really adores, and he is trying to be as inventive with his filmmaking as Pavement was with their songwriting. Pavements is the most unique music doc I’ve ever seen, and a true piece of top-tier filmmaking.
- THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME
As one of my two favorite living filmmakers, Wes Anderson has to really mess up to not be included in a ‘best of’ list of mine. It’s happened, for sure. I was incredibly soft on both Moonrise Kingdom and Isle of Dogs, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. The Phoenician Scheme finds Anderson crafting what might be his first full-on ‘comedy’ since Bottle Rocket. It’s a combination of slapstick, farce, and the sort of laid back adventure dynamics of something out of the 30s or 40s. It gives us the style to which we’ve become accustomed, hilarious supporting turns from Anderson vets like Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, and Benedict Cumberbatch, and a breakout performance from a new Anderson star, Michael Cera. I know folks are always looking for added depth in an Anderson film (I am usually one myself), but it was nice to sit down and enjoy 102-minutes of laughs and smiles. On that front, maybe The Phoenician Scheme is ‘lesser’ Anderson, but even a middling Anderson picture packs more creativity and substance than most everything else out there in theatres.
- 28 YEARS LATER
Leave it to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland to subvert almost every single expectation of what a 28 Years Later film should be. Here is a film that holds zero allegiance to what came before, other than as an initiation for the world it inhabits. It’s a sprawling horror epic, both visually and emotionally, as Alfie Williams turns “Spike” into the most likable protagonist of the year. The cinematography is lush and stunning. The script is tight and moves with urgency. Ralph Fiennes and Jodi Comer deliver tremendous supporting turns. And, the ending is something that has to be seen to be believed, and either gets you very excited about the next installment, or stops this franchise dead in its tracks for you (pun intended). For me, it was certainly the former. Boyle and Garland are exploring serious themes here about family and masculinity, but they’re also just delivering an entertaining story set in a terrible time. I cannot wait to see where this franchise goes next, but after 28 Years Later, the expectations couldn’t possibly be higher.
- EEPHUS
Films like Eephus feel more like a collection of memories than anything else. Attribute that to producer, Tyler Taormina, whose slow-cinema movement has produced some truly stunning works of art. Also deserving credit is director Carson Lund, who has served as DP for some of Taormina’s pictures. Eephus is a baseball movie, sure, and it gets all of that right. But it’s also a film about change – the way people change, and places. Set over the course of a single day at a small baseball field about to be torn down, the film focuses on a group of amateur players as they say goodbye to their home away from home. It’s filled with humor, heartbreak, humanity, and the casual, throwaway conversations that we all engage in regularly, but seldom celebrate. It also, weirdly, feels like a swan song to a classic way of American life. These players are desperate to keep it alive, even if it means turning on the headlights of their cars and playing, dangerously, late into the night – because, once gone, they know it can never come back.
- SINNERS
There’s not much more to say about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners that hasn’t been said by 1,000 other people, but there is a reason the film is topping so many mid-year lists. It’s rare we are given a horror film of this confidence, scale, and originality. There are moments in the film (and we all know what they are) that transcend the screen and become something bigger. It’s a horror film with so many important things on its mind, and Coogler manages to bring them all to life. Yes, there are vampires, but this film is about so much more than that, though Jack O’Connell’s hypnotic performance makes it difficult to think of much else. Michael B. Jordan is tremendous, as always. The rest of the cast universally shine. There are more “Holy shit! What about that scene!” moments than in any film in recent memory, and it’s a testament to how starved audiences are for originality that it has performed as well as it has. Give us unique visions on a grand scale and audiences will generally show up. And leave it to Coogler to give us the greatest post-credit sequence in the history of film. I loved this one – can you tell?
Honorable Mentions: Universal Language, Bring Them Down, Sally, Black Bag, Secret Mall Apartment, Suze, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna, The Luckiest Man in America, Young Hearts, My Mom Jayne, Delicate Arch
Dishonorable Mentions: Absolute Dominion, Opus, A RAD Documentary, Hot Spring Shark Attack, The Sound, Please Don’t Feed the Children, The Rule of Jenny Penn, Death of a Unicorn, A Working Man, Flight Risk, Hammer: Heroes, Legends, and Monsters
