Best Films of 2025

The graphic below identifies the top 25+ films from 2025 that critics ranked on their end-of-year "best of" lists. The full list goes to 100 and if you are interested in seeing it, I'm sourcing the list from the same website as I used last year. I'm fairly certain that the methodology for compilation is the same. Here's the detail I posted last year:

Films are sorted by the percentage of lists they are included on.* This is typically the same as sorting by number of lists included, but can vary when films make lists across multiple years.  For example, if one film makes 10 lists in a year with 100 lists available, it’s ranking will be higher than a film that makes 15 lists when 200 lists are available.  The times a film appears at the top of a list is used as a tie-breaker.

*punctuation errors corrected 

Basically, this is an annual best films comment that I'm posting for 2025. This is the post about the best films of 2024. Below this graphic, you'll find my rankings of these films (by tiers) with a lengthy list of the ones I still need to see. As I watch them over time, I'll edit the post but note the changes with yellow highlighting.  

This "best of" comment is distinct from both the annual post on "films of 2025," which is my end-of-year musing about all the films I saw in a calendar year, and my annual Oscar post, which concerns that year's Academy Award nominees. I have seen some 2025 films in early 2026 and will post about the Oscars soon.

This is my reranking of the top 25:

Top-Tier Films (Oscar-bait)

One Battle After Another

Black Bag

Second-tier films (very good, with minor flaws)

Sorry, Baby

Train Dreams

Eddington

Sinners

Third-tier films (watchable, but more flawed)

Bugonia

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Fourth-tier films (some serious flaws)

Films yet to see:

28 Years Later

Afternoons of Solitude

Blue Moon

Caught by the Tides

Frankenstein

Hamnet

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

It Was Just an Accident

Marty Supreme

Misericordia

No Other Choice

Sentimental Value

Sirat

The Mastermind

The Shrouds

The Secret Agent

Weapons

Glancing through the rest of the top 100, I've seen the following films already and rank them roughly in this order:

Souleymane's Story (76)

A House of Dynamite (52)

The Ballad of Wallis Island (61)

The Phoenician Scheme (33)

Eephus (26)

Roofman (73)

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (38)

Jay Kelly (39)

Companion (84)

One of Them Days (72)

Materialists (54)

Highest 2 Lowest (50)

Friendship (48)

Superman (27) 

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (74)

Nearly all of these films would be in my second or third tier above. 

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