Best of the Year: 2025

Here we are!

Or maybe 17. I don’t do math. What I DO do is, every end of January, take a moment to call out my favorite movies reviewed here from the past year. Does this mean they’re good? NOT ALWAYS. Does this mean they’re relevant to a new year? BASED ON THE DATES, PROBABLY NOT THAT EITHER. 

What it DOES mean is that I really, really really, mostly really liked these movies. Links to the full reviews in each number. This year, we had a nice and round 10.

Let’s go.

10. Blades

The influence of Jaws can probably never be understated. Iconic lines, cinematic tricks, musical style…there are a LOT of ways Steven Spielberg’s first blockbuster changed the world, but it’s ripoffs that I found most exciting on this 50th anniversary. Blades, a 1988 horror comedy, puts the soul of Bruce the shark into a sentient lawnmower hellbent on destroying a golf club’s big summer tournament. The results are very dumb, and very, very fun. 

9. Night Watch

If you ever need to be reminded what it means to be a movie star, consider queuing up Brian G. Hutton’s Night Watch, where a supposedly past her prime Elizabeth Taylor tries to hold onto her sanity while wandering a creaky British estate. It’s the stately kind of stage adaptation filled with crystal decanters and shifty gardeners, with secrets lurking around every fully furnished corner. The ending is a banger in more ways than one. 

8. Alligator

The second Jaws-inspired genre comedy on this year’s list, Alligator is the kind of stupid film that only very smart people can make. Written by John Sayles, directed by Lewis Teague, and starring an often shirtless Robert Forster, this is a film that has a few deeply political opinions to ponder by way of very silly, often barely working alligator rigs. It’s an excessively good time.

7. The Feast

Not surprisingly, I love good food horror. In fact, my affection for it runs equally deep to that of folk horror, making Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast a pretty satisfying 90 minutes. The last ten years have given us plenty of ‘eat the rich’ takes, and while The Feast doesn’t necessarily reinvent the subgenre, it does bring its own serene style. 

6. Woman of the Hour

I’ve always been a fan of Anna Kendrick as a performer, so it was quite nice to discover she’s equally talented behind the camera. In her directorial debut, Kendrick explores the women whose lives were taken or fundamentally changed by real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala. While true crime generally turns my otherwise iron stomach, the version here (slightly fictionalized in details, though generally accurate in spirit) never feels exploitive. Instead, Kendrick and writer Ian McDonald use the backdrop of an incredibly unusual event (Alcala’s real-life appearance on The Dating Game) to tell a story not about a dangerous man, but one about how the women on the other side of male violence have to navigate the world. 

5. The Coffee Table

More black comedy than horror, Caye Casas’s The Coffee Table still managed to be one of my favorite, most inappropriate watches of the year. This is, to be clear, A VERY DARK RIDE. And it’s hilarious. 

4. Everyone Will Burn

Could I tell you what David Hebrero’s movie was actually about? No. Could I spend the next three hours showcasing my own performance art based on the way star Macarena Gómez wears oversized hats? You know it! Everyone Will Burn is a strange, stylish bite of magical realism that feels like the most delicious meal you can eat knowing you’ll suffer food poisoning after. Head on in expecting a beautifully strange ride. 

3. The Lamp

One of the most exciting things about scouring every streaming site on the internet is that you get to discover actual treasures from eras you thought you had already picked dry. A slasher by way of evil djinn made in 1987 and set overnight in a history museum? What ELSE has this world been hiding from me all these years? Tom Daley’s The Lamp (aka The Outing) isn’t necessarily a life-changing watch, but it’s a big hunk of good fun. While there are certainly nostalgic signs of its ‘80s peers, the movie also manages to offer real surprises and stand on its own, something that wasn’t too common for even the best output of the golden age of slashers. 

2. The Hole In the Fence

A film that has been haunting me for the better of 10 months, The Hole In the Fence follows a class of privileged Mexican adolescents as they follow a long-established tradition of camping just outside a poor village supposedly riddled with crime. The boys are safe under the care of their wealthy guardians (all of whom long ago conquered the same right of passage) but the titular structural weakness suggests something very, very dangerous has already breached the barrier. Director Joaquin del Paso is a master at building mood, curating incredibly real performances from his young, mostly untrained cast. The story calls to mind Bacurau, a similarly haunting and violent film about how the haves use the have nots as a playground for their basest urges. But The Hole In the Fence has an even more disturbing undercurrent in focusing on how the young generation is so easy to mold into something so, so awful. This isn’t a movie that will have you cheering, but if you’re looking for true horror, it’s hard to beat. 

1. The Ugly Stepsister

It’s hard to describe just how powerful a feeling it is to see the kind of film your 14-year-old self would have dreamed of making. In her filmmaking debut(!), writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt spins a world as beautiful as it is disgusting, as heartwrenching as it is hysterical. “Cinderella but from the stepsister’s point of view” isn’t a unique concept in itself, but Bilchfeldt’s execution is the kind of thing that makes you feel limitless confidence about the future of genre cinema, especially when it’s in the hands of such deranged genius.