While the most terrifying horror movies of the year are playing out each day across social media feeds nationwide, there are still some films that have managed to break through the 24-hour news cycle that has been the first half of 2025. These films have mostly been terrible. Movie theaters have been dominated by quasi-realistic animated fare, iffy franchise entries, and children screaming “chicken jockey.” But between the sludge and the surprisingly okay, Sinners snuck in and stuck it out. Ryan Coogler’s sultry musical genre mash-up is the year’s case study so far: Quality finds its audience.
Below, in alphabetical order, are the 25 best films of the year so far. These films all became commercially available in the U.S.—in the theater, available to rent, on a streamer—from the first of the year through June 27 (Sorry, Baby is worth stretching the deadline for). This isn’t a list with many box office hits, but rather a selection of small strivers, inventive documentaries, undersung studio projects, brutal body horror, slacker baseball, unloved Looney Tunes, and a double dose of Steven Soderbergh. Great art can cut through the noise without drowning it out, and all these films deserve to be found by those who will love them.
It took more than two decades for Alex Garland and Danny Boyle to check in on the rage-fueled world they created back in 2003, but the time away made their return into an ambitious coming-of-age nightmare. 28 Years Later splits its time between Spike (Alfie Williams) and his dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) venturing out from their island community in search of infected to kill, and Spike and his ailing mom Isla (Jodie Comer) venturing out in search of what could be the last surviving doctor in England. Through these two adventures, and the two perspectives they bring, Spike begins to grow beyond his isolated community while the audience gets to see just how strange things got over the years. As the score thrums and its iPhone-shot images bulge, the world looks and feels warped—and that’s before meeting Ralph Fiennes and his tower of skulls. A far more expansive take on zombie mythology than either of its predecessors, 28 Years Later is still vitally energetic, darkly cheeky, and now shaded with the sadness of an older creative team. [Jacob Oller]
April is an immersive experience, sometimes uncomfortably so. Dea Kulumbegashvili plays with perspective in her second feature: In some scenes, she pulls back for an impassive God’s-eye view. In others, the camera looks through the eyes of the lead character, a shift that’s marked by the sound of her breathing on the soundtrack. The effect is disorienting, placing the viewer outside of what’s happening while implicating them in it at the same time. All of these scenes unfold in immaculately composed long takes, moving from objectivity to subjectivity through the story of Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician in rural Georgia (the country) who performs illegal abortions on the side. Nina’s services are necessary to the community—without her, all of their secrets would be exposed. But they hate her for it, forcing her to the margins like the folk-healer witches of centuries past. Kulumbegashvili makes the link explicit by depicting Nina as a grotesque hag in surreal diversions, her bald head and sagging breasts reminding us of an inconvenient truth: The need for abortion does not go away just because the law forbids it. [Katie Rife]
For all the formal daring of David Koepp and Steven Soderbergh’s first 2025 release, Presence, their second was sleeker and more squarely in both of their wheelhouses. Black Bag is a spycraft romantic thriller led by two experts in espionage trying to maintain a work-life balance amid their jobs at MI6. But when George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) finds his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), on a list of potential traitors, he begins the treacherous process of snooping on his partner. As Woodhouse moves through the list, he uncovers the relationship issues plaguing his whole team, giving the movie a touch of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and the genre some much-needed emotional grounding. Built around a crack cast and bookended by some unforgettable dinner scenes, Black Bag brings the spy thriller back to earth, coupling the sex lives of secret agents with the realities of building a trusting relationship. Like members of Her Majesty’s secret service, Soderbergh and Koepp get in and out cleanly and efficiently, offering some of the director’s most straightforward and effective work in years. [Matt Schimkowitz]
The first entirely animated, non-anthology Looney Tunes movie, The Day The Earth Blew Up, tackles an appropriate subject: The end of the world. Acquired by Ketchup Entertainment after CEO David Zaslav and the debt-laden folks at Warner Bros. Discovery dumped the movie for a tax write-off, The Day The Earth Blew Up succeeds in ways that everyone offended by Zaslav’s treatment of WB’s iconic characters always hoped. It is both strikingly animated and loony as hell. Cutting the cast down to Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, The Day The Earth Blew Up sees the future Duck Dodgers saving the world from alien invasion, and the clean B-movie premise gives director Pete Browngardt plenty of room to play, slapping a fresh coat of paint on these nearly century-old characters. The script by a writers’ room of Browngardt’s regulars and wonderful vocal performances by Peter MacNicol, Candi Milo, and Eric Bauza (who handles both Porky and Daffy) do Mel Blanc proud. But the inventive musical sequences, particularly a Modern Times-inspired number set to the classic Looney tune “Powerhouse,” makes the movie something special. That’s all, folks? Nope! It’s duck season once again. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Eephus, the debut directorial effort from Carson Lund (cinematographer of Ham On Rye and Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point), is the polar opposite of this year’s Friendship: It’s a movie all about how men can and should have friends. It goes about making its case, fittingly, through streaks of melancholy, emotionally stifled chitchat, and an almost religious reverence for baseball. As Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs face each other one last time before their diamond is bricked over for a new school, a couple dozen middle-aged beer-crushers catch up with each other, comment on the weather, and talk trash with an endearing harmlessness. Lund’s cast is composed of regular-looking character actors, fat, haggard, or heading in that direction, all of whom are just as much fun to look at as the crisp afternoon they’re whiling away. Full of overlapping dialogue and lovingly lensed details, Eephus is in conversation with Robert Altman, but far more mellow. Eephus’ oddball title comes from a slowpoke trick pitch (Red Sox long-timer and eephus aficionado Bill “Spaceman” Lee pops up to sling a few) that unexpectedly floats through the air. As the film follows suit, captivating with its leisurely poetry, you’ll understand that Moneyball line: “How can you not be romantic about baseball?” [Jacob Oller]
Writer-director Sarah Friedland’s debut defies familiar stories of memory loss by putting the perspective squarely with the woman living through it. Ruth (regal stage legend Kathleen Chalfant) experiences confusion and frustration as she adjusts to life in her new full-time care facility. But the way this elegant film subverts its weepier peers is by also allowing her to experience warmth, joy, curiosity, pithiness, and rediscovery. As details fade, the things that make Ruth her become even more obvious, like sweeping dirt from a sidewalk mosaic. Chalfant’s striking, quiet, and inquisitive performance makes this feel less like tragedy and more like transition—a bittersweet change, but simply a change nonetheless. Tight close-ups and a light touch with the script keep this moving film from ever feeling maudlin. [Jacob Oller]
After over a decade on the shelf, Final Destination Bloodlines brought Death back in style. With only slight tweaks to its well-established formula, Bloodlines dusts off the Rube Goldberg death machine and straps a new batch of suburban victims in for the ride. A decades-spanning epic that begins with a monumental opening sequence that sees hundreds of happy guests of the Sky View tower plummet to their deaths, Bloodlines follows Stefani, the granddaughter of a woman who interrupted Death’s design back in the ’60s. But it’s not just the intricate kills and imaginative, bone-cracking use of an MRA machine that make directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s film work. They inject a sly, knowing humor that comments on the story and its characters, while also playing with the viewers’ expectations. Final Destination movies have always been funny, often at the film’s expense. Bloodlines is the first to use this humor to the movie’s benefit, keeping the energy up while the wheels of fate crush those trying to outrun their demise. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Is the cure to the ongoing male loneliness epidemic a movie starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd? Probably not. But Robinson’s big-screen debut as a lead actor may have an answer: Men just shouldn’t have friends at all. As he does in his Netflix series, I Think You Should Leave, Robinson blows out the social anxiety facing men of a certain age, those who have reached contentment but have no social life. Misunderstandings and social faux pas drive the life of Craig (Robinson), a marketing executive with a wife, a son, and a new neighbor (Paul Rudd) he desperately wants to befriend. It all goes sideways, of course. Through Craig, Robinson heightens his understanding of the male ego, finding dark and absurd places to travel. Whether whisking his wife away on a romantic getaway to the city sewers or taking a hallucinogenic toad trip into the heart of masculine desire, Friendship aggressively plays with bromantic comedy tropes, turning Craig not only into someone with no friends, but someone who doesn’t deserve them. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Driven to machinima madness by COVID quarantine measures (and a background in theater), Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen attempt to stage a full-length production of Hamlet on the unpredictable virtual streets (and beaches, and skyscapes) of Grand Theft Auto Online. But where Grand Theft Hamlet shines is when the making-of film, a documentary both cheesy and chaotic, breaks free of its own framework to let the unexpected shine through. While there’s an inherent silliness to mashing up Shakespeare and drive-bys (Romeo + Juliet, eat your heart out), when nude aliens start reciting the Quran, there’s a little more flavor than one might expect from a take on the Bard. Utilizing GTA‘s aesthetic and mechanics liberally, the avatars using voice chat and violence in equal measure, the motley crew wring something beautiful from their seemingly futile task. [Jacob Oller]
Invention
After the death of her father, Carrie (Callie Hernandez) comes into the possession of an unusual object. More specifically, she inherits the patent for a strange device that her father created, the prototype of which is housed in a sparse closet at her father’s reclusive estate in the Berkshires. This invention is purported to have healing properties, though initially Carrie approaches it with utmost skepticism. It’s only upon encountering her enigmatic father’s investors and executor—played by independent filmmakers Joe Swanberg, Caveh Zahedi, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins—that she begins to doubt her instincts. Directed by Courtney Stephens from a screenplay co-written with Hernandez, Invention is loosely inspired by the filmmakers’ own relationships with their fathers; indeed, several clips of Hernandez’s own dad appear in the film, many of which are TV spots that saw him hawking similar homeopathic devices. Captured on lush 16mm film, Invention interrogates the exploitative nature of conspiracy-laden pseudoscience while at the same time examining the palpable power that fervent belief can have on the human psyche. [Natalia Keogan]
With Past Lives and now Materialists, writer-director Celine Song underscores a commonly known fact: Dating is tough, and maintaining a relationship is even more arduous when already dealing with everyday troubles, financial issues, and dwindling professional ambitions. Is choosing true love worth it, or even possible? Materialists slowly ponders this question through the lens of matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is stuck between a man who could be her soulmate (Chris Evans) or a “unicorn” (Pedro Pascal) who is better for her on paper. The film’s emotional resonance creeps up on you, thanks to Song’s mature take on the situation—which includes a subplot about a sexual assault faced by Lucy’s client that is true to reality in a way that’s rarely seen in this otherwise breezy genre. With its confident choices and tone, Materialists feels like a modern-day classic already. [Saloni Gajjar]
Thank goodness that Bong Joon Ho put the Hollywood clout he earned from Parasite to use with Mickey 17, a shotgun-spread oddity that is simultaneously an anti-colonial sci-fi, a sex-driven clone comedy, a clumsy Trump satire, an empathetic classic critique, and an acting showcase for Robert Pattinson. The disparate approaches feel less like aspects of the same movie than a series of just-off clones of each other, but that doesn’t stop the shaggy story of Mickey (Pattinson), who takes a “live, die, repeat” style job on a spaceship to escape debt collectors, from being any less enjoyable. As Pattinson’s weaselly voiceover and constant death/resurrection fills the screen, on both a grungy rocket and a well-realized ice planet, the dopey farce of it all triumphs over its epic scale, which lets the energetic filmmaking fuel something that manages to feel like an underdog story despite being a big studio blockbuster. [Jacob Oller]
Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), an out-of-town drifter, becomes embroiled in a paranoid plot of his own creation in Misericordia, the latest from French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie. Returning to his woodsy hometown for the funeral of his former employer, Jérémie quickly cozies up with the deceased’s widow (Catherine Frot), taking residence in the bedroom that once belonged to her now-adult son (Jean-Baptiste Durand). Jérémie’s renewed integration into the neighborhood has mixed results on the locals: The widow’s son clearly feels threatened; an old schoolmate needs a healthy swig of liquor to enjoy his presence; and a local priest discovers an unexpected fondness for the handsome young man. A brutal act of violence causes Jérémie to make unlikely allies and enemies, while wild mushrooms become a natural source of constant anxiety. Fusing pitch-black humor with deadpan delivery, Guiraudie continues his exploration of the dark heart of desire in Misericordia. Come for the conspiracy, stay for an unexpected moment of explicit nudity delicately executed as comedic relief. [Natalia Keogan]
A Nice Indian Boy
The tenderness of A Nice Indian Boy sticks with you. A rom-com with a deceptively simple formula, Roshan Sethi’s film, based on Madhuri Shekar’s play, has all the expected beats: Opposites attract, sparks fly, they fall in love. And then, the relationship briefly crumbles when differences arise. Naveen (an exceptional Karan Soni, Sethi’s real-life husband), a shy Indian man, doesn’t know how to deal with his immigrant parents’ uncertainty towards his outgoing white partner, Jay (Jonathan Groff, acing the doe-eyed lover persona). Naveen also can’t fully confront his own fear of commitment. In the process of gently prodding at Naveen’s emotional struggles and allowing him to heal, A Nice Indian Boy sweetly explores larger themes of queerness and acceptance, with a specific focus on his complicated familial bonds. In Sethi’s capable hands, the film avoids stereotyping South Asian traditions, instead riffing off a beloved Bollywood movie Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, giving the classic a reaffirming contemporary spin. [Saloni Gajjar]
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl begins on a sardonic note, observing with detached amusement the absurdity that ensues when Shula (Susan Chardy), a young, modern woman, gets roped into the performative mourning of a traditional Zambian funeral. Shula’s feelings towards the deceased are mixed, to say the least. But her aunts insist that everyone in the family pretend that Uncle Fred was a good man, even as Shula and her cousins celebrate his death in private. This simmering tension gradually boils over, as the tone of Rungano Nyoni’s second feature shifts from dry mockery to white-hot rage. The patriarchal system that blames a teenage widow for her middle-aged husband’s death by misadventure—if she was a better wife he would have stayed at home, is the argument—depends on silence. That’s where the film’s title comes in, casting Shula and her cousins as the chattering birds who dare to speak up and make noise when there’s a predator in their midst. [Katie Rife]
A lavish, sexually charged period piece, On Swift Horses is full of compelling contradictions that make it timeless. The airy, sunny American landscape counters the suffocation often felt by its protagonists. Set in the aftermath of the Korean War, the story (adapted by Bryce Kass from Shannon Pufahl’s novel) promises freedom for its characters, all embarking on new adventures. But what good is hope for a fresh start if your true self has to be hidden away? Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Julius (Jacob Elordi), along with the objects of their desires, remain trapped within the confines of traditional societal expectations. Through their intense yearnings, On Swift Horses presents a remarkable roller coaster of emotion. Unexpectedly wry and thankfully avoiding pitfalls of “tragic queer love” tropes (for the most part), the movie’s strengths are compounded by a cast—including Will Poulter, Diego Calva, and Sasha Calle—that shares crackling chemistry. [Saloni Gajjar]
A musical, museum exhibit, concert footage, and spoof biopic are all folded into Pavements, an experimental docu-fiction about the iconic indie rock band Pavement, helmed by Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell, The Color Wheel). In New York City, the musical—entitled Slanted! Enchanted!—and the museum pop-up caused a stir all their own, and the meta conceit of the film finds Perry struggling to incorporate these elements into the narrative fabric of Pavements itself. But Joe Keery is the real highlight here, as the film charts his dogged pursuit to embody Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus via method acting techniques that satirize the dedication of actors tasked with playing legendary musicians (see: Austin Butler’s lingering accent post-Elvis). Matching the acerbic wit and nihilism that streaks the band’s discography, Pavements may not always congeal into a product as singular as the band’s output, but at least it aims to match their singular headiness. [Natalia Keogan]
Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp’s other 2025 release presents an original formal gamble: A haunted house movie from the ghost’s perspective. Focusing on a fracturing family in their recently purchased cursed abode, Presence finds a ghostly vantage for Soderbergh’s ongoing interests in surveillance and fly-on-the-wall camera setups. The result is a meditative but no less unsettling look at parenting dynamics when mother Rebekah (Lucy Liu) puts all her love into one child and neglects the other. Reflecting her daughter’s (Callina Liang) own feelings of familial alienation, the specter’s swooping movements go unnoticed by the family until she notices things moving around the house. The film builds to a tense, emotional crescendo as it mixes incorporeal helplessness with the horror of adolescence. The shift in perspective transforms the haunting into a tragedy where the phantom screams out for attention, resulting in one of the most chilling final shots of the year. [Matt Schimkowitz]
At a time when the terms “Cronenbergian” and “body horror” are thrown around to describe almost any movie with so much as a single squish foleyed onto the soundtrack, David Cronenberg himself has been busy refining and redefining what those descriptors truly mean. The Shrouds has no shortage of fascination with the limits of our bodies; it’s about Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a man who has channeled grief over his wife Becca’s death into an invention that allows mourners to view a video feed of their loved ones’ bodies in the grave. But Karsh’s (and the movie’s) obsession with decay is more about the slow physical process by which some of us disappear from this world, something that can begin well before we’re in the ground, as seen in ambiguous flashback/dream sequences involving Becca (Diane Kruger) losing pieces of herself to cancer. Though very much the work of an older man near the end of his career and life (and indeed, Cronenberg did lose his wife in 2017, making this movie particularly personal), The Shrouds also feels plugged into our mediated present, with countless scenes filtered through screens, right up through the specially-equipped gravestones. Put together, this is Cronenbergian in 2025: Mournful and reflective yet, somehow, gravely funny—and inimitable. [Jesse Hassenger]
It ought to be a burden, serving as a standard-bearer for original movies in American cinema. But despite the heaviness of issues like assimilation, racism, and musicianship as a flashpoint between the secular and the devout in the hard-to-classify horror-drama-period-musical Sinners, writer-director Ryan Coogler manages to wear his newfound status lightly, while still granting the movie itself plenty of weight. Freed from three consecutive movies of franchise duty (much of it nonetheless miraculously personal and all-around terrific), Coogler plays Sinners in a different key, at once joyously funny in its community hangout solidarity—most of the movie’s first half consists of twins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) running errands to prep their new juke joint for its opening night—and darkly thrilling once the Irish-folk-singing vampires show up. The film’s strategy is deeply and (in its centerpiece musical sequence) movingly American: It takes various pieces of cultural lore, like the idea of blues so fiery it draws heat from the devil himself or the rule about vampires requiring an invitation to cross a threshold or the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez mashup From Dusk Till Dawn, and refashions them into a single cohesive, exciting work. [Jesse Hassenger]
Writer-director-star Eva Victor breaks out in a big way with their literarily structured, nonchronological account of a professor coping with sexual assault. Not only because they make this fragmented approach to post-traumatic memory so vitally tied to the plot, so thematically connected to the story they’re telling, but because they make subject matter this crushing so, so funny. Victor writes with a mannered specificity and a lived-in jokiness around Naomi Ackie’s character, and performs it with exactly enough eccentricity to make it feel real. Drawing out recognizable interpersonal relationships with the same ease as the New England academic scene in which they all collide and vie for the same gigs, Sorry, Baby digs into a small corner of the world and finds something harrowing, yet universal. Add in a scene-stealing supportering turn from John Carroll Lynch, as well as—again—some of the year’s funniest lines, and you’ve got a film that should put Eva Victor on everyone’s radar. [Jacob Oller]
Superboys Of Malegaon
Superboys Of Malegaon, which made its TIFF debut last year,is a poignant ode to filmmaking itself. The driving force behind director Reema Kagti’s Hindi-language movie is the question of what compels storytellers to bring their vision to life. Is it leaving behind an indelible legacy for generations or simply achieving fame and wealth in the present? If watching movies on the silver screen is a brief respite for the four oddball leads here, then creating them becomes a passion they refuse to escape. Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), Shafique (Shashank Arora), Farogh (Vineet Kumar), and Irfan (Saqib Ayub) dream of making it out of their small town by latching onto the camera for dear life and using it as a tool to tell their story. They start by making spoofs of Bollywood movies, which eventually splits the group in two: Nasir wants to stick to what works, while Farogh pursues originality. Layered with stellar dialogue and performances, Superboys Of Malegaon shrewdly observes the universal impact of cinema, even if it stays firmly rooted in its Indian setting. [Saloni Gajjar]
I’ve personally written more about The Ugly Stepsister than any other film this year, because the body horror film was great at Sundance and it’s stayed great all year long. Sometimes a nasty piece of work just stays stuck in your head. But if Emilie Blichfeldt’s savage, fucked-up fairy tale still hasn’t kept you up at night, it’s worth embracing its gross-out fable (as long as your stomach is up to the task). Led by a fearless, committed performance by Lea Myren as Elvira, and lavishly realized by a design team specializing both in medieval torture devices and dilapidated finery, The Ugly Stepsister is beautiful, relentless, and perverse—kind of like a prince going door to door measuring feet. Cinderella just couldn’t hack it like Elvira. [Jacob Oller]
Enough time spent as a slacker, let alone having a child as one, colors the appeal of living on the fringes. For the uncool elder punks in Vulcanizadora, played by writer-director Joel Potrykus (whose work has matured alongside his personal life) and his frequent star/subject of torture Joshua Burge, it’s a life that’s suddenly sprinting towards its end, one way or another. In the same slow-burn, tragicomic, men-in-woods milieu as last year’s Good One and Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy (but with a black-hearted, hilarious twist), this Midwestern trip from the heart of darkness back out into the suburbs is sometimes silly but always bold. But, funny as it can be, insecurities and anxieties weigh down the man-children at its rusted-metal core. What starts as a hike lugging hefty social baggage becomes an absurd death march as lower-middle class men struggle to find purpose, or even to move on from their pasts. [Jacob Oller]
Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s collaborative effort to bring Mendoza’s memories of combat during the Iraq War back to life, is surprisingly enjoyable. The film efficiently charts a squadron’s nebulous mission in real time that ends with limbs separated from bodies and a stark depiction of the brutality of war. An effective thriller which could be read on the surface as “propaganda,” Warfare simply depicts events as Mendoza and his fellow soldiers remember them. The portrayal comes off as anti-war just by virtue of its presentation: If these are indeed Mendoza’s truthful memories, he not only remembers his teammate’s mistreatment of Iraqis but also of one another, as their blind nationalism leads them, and many more, to death. As the credits roll and side-by-sides are shown of the actors and the real soldiers they portrayed, over half of the soldiers’ faces are blurred—a telling necessity. These murky politics only make Warfare a more interesting experience to engage with. [Brianna Zigler]
