10 Best Movies of 2025 — Must-Watch Films of the Year

F1 The Movie shifts the high-speed spectacle of Formula 1 into a surprisingly grounded summer blockbuster, with Joseph Kosinski (of Top Gun: Maverick fame) steering a story that balances raw racing thrills with a reflective look at legacy and teamwork. Brad Pitt leads as Sonny Hayes, a once-legendary driver coaxed out of retirement to help an underdog APXGP team, joining forces with rising talent Damson Idris and guided by the steady presence of Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon and Tobias Menzies in the mix, all while real Grand Prix backdrops and Hans Zimmer’s score give every frame a widescreen pulse. Shot during actual F1 weekends, the sound design and editing are a technical marvel, making the theater experience feel alive, cinematic and utterly addictive even without cheap jokes, and it’s one of those films you’ll be glad you saw big.

Hope is not a strategy. Create your own breaks.

One Battle After Another (2025) follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a former activist and revolutionary who finds himself pulled back into political chaos years after the movement that once defined him, forcing him to confront both the world he tried to change and the person he’s become. It feels like Paul Thomas Anderson leaning back into the kind of sprawling, character-driven filmmaking we don’t get enough anymore—messy, funny, political, and deeply human. DiCaprio is brilliant as a man whose insecurity and paranoia are played with such raw honesty that you can’t look away, even when the film slips into dark comedy. The story moves slowly but with purpose, touching on immigration, revolution, and the lingering weight of old ideologies without ever feeling like a studio product chasing trends. It’s the rare modern movie that feels made by an artist first—and it stays with you long after it ends.

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc (2025) feels less like an anime “arc” stitched into a feature and more like a full-blown cinematic event, the kind you walk out of knowing you’ll revisit again and again. Directed by Tatsuya Yoshihara, it captures something rare: the quiet, human beauty of Denji simply living—walking, talking, fumbling through a fragile romance with Reze—before unleashing action on a scale that’s almost impossible to describe. The film’s second half becomes a relentless visual symphony, with MAPPA’s animation, sound design, and sheer production ambition pushing anime spectacle into a new realm. It’s heartfelt, brutal, breathtaking, and when that climax lands, it hits harder than expected—one of the most unforgettable anime theater experiences in years.

Denji: Everyone's after my chainsaw heart! What about Denji's heart?

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value quietly earns its title, following sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Alma Pöysti) as they reunite with their estranged filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) after their mother’s death. When Nora declines the lead role he wrote for her, Gustav casts rising star Elle Fanning in her place, reopening wounds and revealing how fragile family connections become when ambition and regret collide. Trier and co writer Eskil Vogt treat depression and memory with a light touch, so the film feels gentle even as it burrows deep; the performances are natural and lived in, and Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography bathes Norwegian landscapes in a warmth that lets the past comfort these adults. It’s quietly devastating, profoundly mature—my favourite film of 2025, and a story you’ll carry with you.

Hamnet (2025) is a quiet, luminous kind of historical drama, reimagining the life of Shakespeare through the grief that shaped it, as a family is torn open by loss and memory becomes its own form of survival. Chloé Zhao directs with astonishing restraint, letting silence, nature, and small gestures speak louder than dialogue, while the performances feel subtle, raw, and deeply human. The film’s visual language is breathtaking—soft light, earthy textures, and cinematography that makes each frame feel like a painting you don’t want to look away from. And by the time it reaches its final act, culminating in a hauntingly staged theatrical sequence, it becomes something unforgettable: not just a story about tragedy, but about the fragile beauty of carrying love forward through art.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle (2025) arrives with the kind of scale few anime films can match, feeling like the next pop-culture earthquake after Mugen Train brought Western audiences crashing into theaters and shattered records. As the first chapter in the trilogy that will close out this era-defining series, it delivers exactly what fans hoped for: massive emotion, relentless momentum, and animation so lavish that nearly every frame looks hand-carved for the big screen. Ufotable’s production is staggering, turning the Infinity Castle into a shifting art gallery of action and atmosphere. It still carries some episodic DNA—as if you’re watching the ultimate premium arc—but the spectacle is undeniable, and it’s hard not to feel anime history being written again.

No Other Choice (2025) follows a middle-aged salaryman (Lee Byung-hun) whose life collapses after he’s suddenly fired, forcing him into a ruthless competition of desperation as he searches for a way to survive with dignity intact. Park Chan-wook is in razor-sharp form again, taking this grounded setup and twisting it into a darkly funny, constantly gripping satire where every scene feels unpredictable. The film moves with thriller tension but also a wicked comedic edge, balancing absurdity with genuine unease as the protagonist drifts toward unthinkable choices. It’s fresh in a way that’s hard to explain—stylish, strangely hilarious, and completely director-driven, with Park’s signature control over mood, pacing, and irony. A twisted modern survival story that lingers long after the laughter fades.

Marty Supreme (2025) is a high-energy character ride built almost entirely around Timothée Chalamet’s magnetic performance as Marty, a fiercely driven young man whose obsession with greatness becomes both inspiring and unsettling. Loosely shaped like a sports underdog story, the film follows Marty’s relentless climb, not always through the right choices—he lies, gambles, hurts people, and crosses lines—but Chalamet makes his hunger feel so raw that you can’t help rooting for him anyway. There’s something thrilling in watching a character who will do anything to matter, to win, to leave a mark, even when ambition turns ugly. It’s fast, entertaining, and powered by a star performance that keeps you locked in from start to finish.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) may not reach the dizzy highs of the franchise’s very best entries, but it’s still one of the year’s strongest action spectacles, and a reminder of how rare it is for a long-running series to deliver this consistently. Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt for a more serious, sentimental chapter that feels designed as a deserved farewell, carrying a weight and finality that sets it apart from the pure adrenaline rush of past films. The set pieces remain massive, the production polish is undeniable, and even when it doesn’t reinvent the formula, it executes it with the confidence of a franchise that has earned its legacy. I placed it high partly because I grew up with these films—and it still feels good to watch them go out with purpose.

Our lives are not defined by any one action. Our lives are the sum of our choices.

Rental Family (2025) is a gentle, quietly moving film built around a simple but strangely profound idea: what if you could “rent” the feeling of belonging when life starts to feel lonely? The story unfolds with warmth and lightness, following characters who find unexpected comfort in relationships that begin as artificial but slowly reveal something real underneath. There’s no heavy melodrama or exaggerated emotion—just a calm, heartfelt exploration of connection, healing, and the small kindnesses that carry people forward. It’s the kind of movie that feels like a soft reminder rather than a grand statement, and by the time it ends, you realize how deeply it understands the human need to be seen, even in the most ordinary moments.

Bugonia (2025) begins with a wildly absurd setup: two conspiracy-obsessed men (Jesse Plemons among them) become convinced that a powerful CEO (Emma Stone) is not human at all, but an alien infiltrator, and their obsession quickly spirals into something darker, funnier, and stranger than anyone expects. It’s the kind of premise that sounds impossible to pull off—and yet, in the hands of Yorgos Lanthimos, it somehow works as hypnotic satire. Stone and Plemons are gripping, playing the film’s offbeat paranoia with deadpan precision as the story slips into uncomfortable comedy and surreal unease. It’s bizarre, sharp, and weirdly addictive, the sort of movie that feels like an alien transmission disguised as a dark comedy. Every year has one truly odd masterpiece, and Bugonia might be it.

Frankenstein (2025) reimagines Mary Shelley’s classic tragedy through Guillermo del Toro’s unmistakably gothic lens, following Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) as his obsession with creation spirals into something monstrous and deeply human. The film is overflowing with atmosphere—shadowy castles, haunting beauty, and cinematography that constantly reminds you this was meant to be a theatrical event. That’s also its one frustration: as a Netflix release, watching it on a TV can’t fully match the cinematic scale everyone talks about. Still, del Toro’s direction is rich with emotion and craft, and the performances, especially from Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, give the story a strange tenderness beneath the horror. Even from the couch, it feels like a grand visual spectacle trying to claw its way onto the big screen.

The hunter did not hate the wolf. The wolf did not hate the sheep. But violence felt inevitable between them. Perhaps, I thought, this was the way of the world. It would hunt you and kill you just for being who you are.