Some Favorite Films I’ve Seen in 2025

The year has halved itself already. Soon, it shall end, the last six months will whistle past like the first. But at least, new things have happened to me during the first half of the year, as they must have to many people. Part of these new things is that I reversed, this year, the order in which I see movies. Ordinarily, I love working my way through movies from the past to the present. Almost always, I also skip so-so movies, present or past. While I have continued to do the latter, I made myself go through my watch list from present to recent. I fed on some of the most memorable movies of this year, the last, the last two. Below, then, is a list, though as incomplete as any list of this kind, of those that I most enjoyed, most of them from the past three years.

These are two ways a film can make a cultural impact, instant or belated: start a critical conversation or reinvent film grammar. The first is the quicker; the audience, though not the critics, are often slower to catch up on the second. Ryan Coogler is a filmmaker with the first instinct. As with Black Panthers, his latest, Sinners (2025), has inspired a flurry of essays. That is no small achievement. I am however not inclined to over-intellectualize his music-inspired horror flick.

With music as both a motif and an entryway, Sinners yields a fresh or, at least, a rare take on the vampire horror genre. With this, too, it shines a pan-African vision, tracing a line from the griot traditions of West Africa to the Southern blues of the movie’s time and place – 1930s, Mississippi – and back to the then-futuristic hip-hop, currently a global force. This is testament to Coogler’s sense of taste and balance. On display as well are stellar performances that keep up to the director’s lofty vision, particularly that of Michael B. Jordan’s and Wunmi Mosaku's. The film’s proportion, though, seems slightly uneven: the more realistic first half of the film is more sure-footed than the final, supernatural half. Overall Sinners is a clean piece of Southern Gothic.

Of the films I’ve seen and have come to like these past six months, two of them make cultural impact the slower route: they reinvent film grammar. The second is RaMell Ross’ 2024 Nickel Boys. The first, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024), does so almost to a fault. With a script he co-wrote with Eric Berger, Tyler Taormina’s third directorial effort rejigs the conventions of cinematic storytelling. The style is pointillism, if the painting technique, where pictures are made from small dots of color instead of lines or strokes, can be applied to cinema. Multiple subplots and narrative points sit beside each other as splinters. That the film is coherent is no small feat of visionary scripting, directing, and editing. There are pluses: it’s a Christmas film set in the 2000s, full of nostalgia and yearnings; there’s a large family holidaying for a get-to-together; there is comedy, absurdist comedy at some point, as much as there is drama.

Nickel Boys does not reinvent narrative form as much as make a success of a rare technique that is even more rarely used well: Ross’ camera is buried inside his protagonist’s head. The movie is shown, literally, from the first person perspective of teenager Elwood and, later, while in an abusive reform school, from his inmate-friend Turner’s, too. The result, perhaps beyond the emotional resonance, is moral: we see the evil from the victims’ perspective and not a voyeur’s. Such perspectival proximity circumvents a passive spectatorship; it attests, most poignantly, the weight of an evil history. The movie is adapted, by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, The Nickel Boys. Their adaptation is both faithful and original.

A great movie is one we always go back to. We rewatch, we recollect, we recall. There are, yet, others, no less great, that we cannot bear to go back to. Perfect Days is, for me, one of the latter. I do not want my first-time experience of it shaken out of me. So, I have not seen it again. Breathless, soulful, saintly, Wim Wenders’ Tokyo city tale is about how a public toilet cleaner, Hiyarama (Kōji Yakusho, brilliant), spends his days. His days are a cyclic whorls of mostly primitive acts: sleeping, waking, eating, reading, and, prominent of all, brushing toilets clean. But he is settled into this cruelly monotonous life. It is one of those “boring” films, boring in a positive sense, like the best of dirty realist literature: minimal characters, almost plotless, scanty dialogue, clean cinematography. Here, Wenders is able to inject palpable optimism into the absurdity of life. His is the best film I've seen all year.

Victor Erice’s 2023 On Close Your Eyes is another movie that is boring in the positive sense. A film about film, images, memory, it is self-aware about its pace, which, unhurried, is neither slow nor fast. It relies best on its own internal logic and speaks its own language most fluidly. Thus, you have to make the movie teach you how to watch it. In fact, you don’t watch it as much as read it, calmly, carefully, calculatedly. Alfonso Cuaron once remarked that film is fast becoming a medium for lazy readers. Close Your Eyes, which reads like a great novel, wants for itself, like most great novels, the most acute readers. This, here, finally, is a simple act of capturing permanence on the flicker of a screen, shut off with a most moving ending.

An impeccable piece of writing is what Spike Lee's 1989 Do The Right Thing is. Somehow, the plot reminds me of Soyinka's The Beatification Of Area Boy. It is a long cursive line that comes to its end so naturally, so much that one feels it hasn't been scripted at all, like Soyinka's play’s. This movie is a stylized piece of filmmaking that, like Kieslowski's 1994 masterpiece Red, makes the most of the color red. The third of these two films will be Spike Jonze's Her (2013), another film that milked the poetry out of red. A fourth should be Wong Kar Wai's In The Mood For Love (2002). But, with its depiction of racial violence, symbolized by a boiling hot weather, Do The Right Thing is too serious to be carried away by its technical achievements.

New realities recently called for a second viewing of Edward Berger's 2024 Conclave, which I saw it for the first time earlier in the year. It is an impressive political drama, thriller even, with an impressive production value. It proves, too, to be a timely and an available piece of culture when Pope Francis died, giving us a picture of how his successor would be elected. The script, adapted from Robert Harris’ 2016 novel by Peter Straughan, keeps its suspense from spilling over too quickly or too slowly. I think its ending a tear in its plot: it reads as sheer, naive optimism instead of "reality." But the film remains new both of the not-too-far-apart times I watched it. It has, however, been faulted – and I agree – for, in quotes, an ahistorical treatment of the African palpable (Cardinal Adeyemi) and for killing its only black cardinal (same Adeyemi) first and worst, a Hollywood racial trope. 

Here, to cap the list, are five extra movies I had hoped to squeeze among the seven above, which will bring the movies to twelve, a number which, in turn, make make two movies per month for all of the first half of the year: Sing Sing (2023), a prison drama that depicts the hard work of staying grounded in life, a companion piece to Perfect Days; A Real Pain (2024), used-to-be-intimate cousins, Benji and David, toured Poland to “glimpse” their Jewish heritage in this comic drama, complete with piecemeal yet deep reflections on family, class, privilege, history, etc.; Blitz (2024), for registering the horror of WWW II by circumventing it through the ordeals of a lost nine-year-old George; The Hateful Eight (2015), this three-hour Tarantino Western, an artsy piece of snack, is the movie I have rewatched the most this year; The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), simply one of the best dark humor pieces of art I've seen in recent years. 𖦹