Jenna’s Top Ten Movies of 2025

Good riddance, 2025! A horrible year that beat me up and left me for dead. But now I get my revenge… talking about all of the high points and low points of its movie releases! Some might say this is a sorry excuse for compensation and I would say… yeah, it is, considering. But whatever. We’re doing it!

Most of the movies this year seemed to be about disillusionment, heartbreak, abandonment and awful people coming out on top – relatable and recognizably 2025 themes! So I had a grand ol’ time, especially when it came to foreign films. Foreign films are usually my savior but anybody bitching about movies being mediocre this year simply needs to expand their horizons.

Speaking of complaining, here’s my quick run down of popular films: I’m genuinely glad Sinners had such a great reception considering all of the drama with the Hollywood PR machine trying to crush it, but I wish I had liked it more. I’m a big fan of the Mission Impossible series, as I wrote about on Back Row in previous years, and I wasn’t disappointed by its schlocky but eye-popping The Final Reckoning. Sentimental Value is the first Joachim Trier film I’ve genuinely liked. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was not my speed, but Die My Love was bizarre enough it won me over. Eddington frustrated me, like most of Ari Aster’s films, but I can’t deny its spot-on portrayal of how 2020 accelerated widespread anxiety to the point it has overtaken the concept of truth in society. Similarly, I was pleasantly surprised by 28 Years Later being overtly about the post-pandemic horror of unaddressed grief. Marty Supreme was entertaining but less than supreme. Superman was kinda super tho.

So let’s get to the best of the best:

1. One Battle After Another (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Revolution is made to propel. Political ideology is made to crumble. These are philosophies of movement — they require constant tending, evolution, and human sacrifice in order to stay relevant, and even then they are not built to last. They are as unpredictable and temporary as the people who dedicate their lives to them. They are a young person’s game — the means to an end, not a structure to build a life upon.

I love to watch PTA movies but I find I don’t always love his movies. Happy to say he really nailed it with this one; One Battle After Another is essentially his Dr. Strangelove. A political satire, a commentary on our troubled times, and an acknowledgement that no one person is stronger than the system they imagine they’re living under — even those who work to uphold it against the inevitable change. It’s lean, pointed, laugh out loud funny and dead serious. It’s all of his classic themes: anxiety, desperation, the importance of family, fear of aging and irrelevance, living in the moment and being punished for the lack of foresight. The biggest difference here is this is surprising not a character study — these are broad caricatures, stand ins for a type of person or a philosophy instead of full realized human beings.

Sean Penn is so goddamn great in this, just a top tier perfect role for him. Nobody can nail a conservative blowhard like a raging liberal. I was also blown away by Teyana Taylor, also perfectly cast and totally iconic as the sort of revolutionary who doesn’t know how to exist outside of the fight.

2. The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto, dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

A complex and empathetic, The Secret Agent plays with perception and memory in a way that reminds you how our connection with the truth has always been tenuous.

Told through a mesmerizing and yet halting pace, the way director Filho crafted the structure to reinforce the themes throughout is genuinely masterful. Never fully following any one character, or sticking with one narrative, the film follows an ensemble cast as it floats through various memories of Brazil under military dictatorship in the 1970s. It’s a collection of memories, laid out together in a pattern: The time I saw a dead body at the gas station when I returned home. The bastard who disrespected me in front of my son. The summer a human leg was found inside of a shark. The safe house I stayed in before we moved to Sweden. The archival tapes I transcribed for months. The week Jaws came out in theaters. The day my dad never came home. All of these incidents are portrayed as layered, complex, not necessarily what they seem — if it’s not the authorities actively trying to censor the truth, or rebels changing the details to skirt authorities, it’s collective trauma blocking our ability to comprehend our own experiences.

What it all amounts to is somehow staggering in scope and yet hard to see. The closer we get the less we want to know, the further we get the more detail is obscured from view. It’s our past and our present and our future and our cautionary tale. It’s the crushing weight of human history. The experience of watching The Secret Agent almost feels like trying to stop a freight train with your bare hands.

Wagner Moura is amazing in this, but so is the entire cast – so many memorable faces and empathetic portraits painted of people who feel so real you could have sworn you met them. Considering this clocks in at two and a half hours long, I could have watched another hour of it, really.

3. Misericordia (Miséricorde, dir. Alain Guiraudie)

I’m not sure where to start with Misericordia, a bizarre and yet comically nightmarish erotic horror film. It reminded me a lot of Kafka’s The Castle but with a Talented Mr Ripley meets Teorema slant; when a young man returns to his childhood village to honor the passing of his old boss, he somehow becomes entangled in a series of quickly escalating events, based on a complete misunderstanding and resulting in murder. I’d be more explicit but honestly it’s better to go in blind.

I genuinely loved how dreamlike this entire film is, you have no idea where it’s going to go until it hits some invisible barrier – then it doubles back and strikes out again in a different direction. It reminds me of a lot of Russian cinema actually, it’s got a really absurd and darkly uncomfortable sense of humor. Gonna throw Zerograd into my list of references.

It’s part a musing on the inescapability of small towns, and the trap of revisiting childhood friends who can’t see you past their own memories. Everything in this is a trap actually — death, guilt, longing, immaturity. The sort of nightmares you can’t wake up from, forever course correcting your path in circles around the drain.

Wild, weird, memorably acted slice of insanity.

4. The History of Sound (dir. Oliver Hermanus)

I wrote about The History of Sound on Back Row already, so I’ll just say: anybody who told you this was a boring slog is just not paying attention. I was just really blown away by how this film draws a clear parallel between the experience of love and the power of music. Showing how even after the partnership has severed, the love does not disappear – like a song, it repeats and swells and reverberates inside of you, long after the record has stopped.

5. It Was Just An Accident (یک تصادف ساده,, dir. Jafar Panahi)

A beautiful mix of rage and empathy, everything you’ve heard about It Was Just An Accident is correct. Made without official permission in Iran by a director who has been imprisoned multiple times, it’s a daring and cutting damnation of totalitarianism and those who think ‘just following orders’ is a passive act. The brilliance of the filmmaking here lies in its limitations; packed with long scenes of pure dialogue and enough one shots that you could easily adapt this into a one act play, yet it never feels stagey or constrained. Sure, there are moments when I wish there had been more going on on screen to benefit the story’s emotional heightening, but I can’t deny that even as is it’s highly effective throughout. Great, sharp premise, solid acting, and looming violence without spectacle — precisely the type of urgent political filmmaking the world severely lacks. 

Hard to watch a movie like this, contrasted with how glossy and immature the past decade’s popular political satires feel in comparison.

6. The Perfect Neighbor (dir. Geeta Gandbhir)

Absolutely haunting and cleverly made documentary that trusts its audience with all of the facts and the nuances that come with them. The Perfect Neighbor is a documentary that uses police body cams to detail the days leading up to a murder of a black woman by her white neighbor, who justified her actions with Florida's stand-your-ground law.

Susan Lorincz is a clearly troubled woman. She appears to have mental health issues she has not addressed, compounded with unchecked anger and an admittedly racist upbringing. Her belief in the superiority of her feelings above all others, and her belief in the superiority of her sense of peace above all others, does not leave room for anybody to share. She’s pitiable in her narrow-minded simplicity, in the sorry circumstances she clearly faced at some earlier time in her life. But as we first meet her in this ‘story’ she’s already monstrous — precisely the portrait of unchecked, hideous rage and fear that she projects upon the faces of every woman and child she sees from between her blinds. 

Ajike we know considerably less about, based on the lack of security footage. We see her briefly, calm and rational, but understandably frustrated. Instead, we learn about her through the aftermath of the act — the anguished screams of her children, the sorrow of her community, and recounted remembrances. It’s everything you don’t get from a headline, all of the emotional aftermath you don’t normally see in a true crime story. The beating heart behind the cold facts, the ripples that irrevocably tear apart a sea of human lives and a once happy community. 

The Perfect Neighbor doesn’t try to explain any of this, it just shows you how quickly these situations can escalate from annoying to deadly. How little the cops can legally act when faced with the signs of clearly mounting aggression. The way casual racism dehumanizes those around you, infusing every interaction with unearned ‘terror’ when you glimpse just how many people you need to share the planet with. The inherent amorality in ‘reasonableness’ being defined by whoever has the gun in their hand. 

Brilliant documentary. Horrific, nightmare-inducing subject. I hope this is seen far and wide.

7. Friendship (dir. Andrew DeYoung)

In Friendship, Tim Robinson both plays a nightmare and is living a nightmare — which is funny either way. The sheer terror of feeling comfortable enough to be yourself in front of new, cool friends and being summarily and definitively rejected for it is just so, so good. As is the terror of trying to befriend somebody you thought was nice but just a little bit awkward, and then quickly realizing they’re a co-dependent psychopathic energy vampire who can’t take no for an answer. 

Sprinkle in some A+ physical comedy, some ridiculously stupid small talk humor, a couple of great cameos (Conner O’Malley and Josh Segarra, specifically), and Paul Rudd doing the Robert Redford slow smile and nod to the camera a few times – it’s a cringe comedy delight. Nothing ever makes me laugh more than inappropriately big reactions to relatively minor inconveniences, and Tim Robinson is a king of that.

8. Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater)

Blue Moon is fairly brilliant one act play set to film with just enough minor location changes to keep your eyes open. Ethan Hawke is absolutely crushing it, not only because he has 90% of the dialogue but because he genuinely embodies this mix of desperate, optimistic delusion, mixed with deep, pessimistic brokenness. The rest of the cast is pretty lackluster (so’s some of the dialogue when it tips into ‘preciousness’) until Andrew Scott shows up and introduces an even more interesting dynamic — the old partner that still loves their ex but can no longer stand to be around them for more than five minutes without being triggered, yet has a hard time walking away from their palpable sadness and the memory of who they once were. Oof.

Another film that’s about heartbreak and abandonment, but this time it’s about the pain of showing those you love too much of yourself, only for them to keep you at arms length in response. The pain of being born with all of the talents, charm and big, bold, Broadway-style emotions of a leading man but not the looks. The truth is nobody really wants the entire truth — a hard pill to swallow when you don’t know how to begin to contain all of the swirling feelings inside of you. 

9. The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson)

Wes Anderson is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t at this point. Everybody’s got their own whimsical idea of his films and even though he’s arguably spent the last decade trying to undermine that very concept (especially in his last two films that focused explicitly on breaking down audience expectations and his own filmmaking style) people still won’t allow him to grow. So here we have Anderson saying “fuck it” and giving us a straight story — one that opens with a jarring and bloody explosion just to kick your twee expectations in the mouth one more time. 

The Phoenician Scheme arguably has more DNA in common with The Royal Tenenbaums than people might want to admit. The cast is less ‘sexy’ and the story more removed from urbane society, but the heart of it is a selfish and immature father/emotionally stunted daughter love story. Plus, The Phoenician Scheme is funny. It’s maybe his most comedy forward film since The Life Aquatic. And that’s where I suspect all of these disappointed reactions are springing up from — there’s no cold snap to deep emotional tone shift, and the film’s all the better for it. 

Call it shallow, call it slight, but that’s only if you’re expecting a drama. It’s a fully fleshed out comedy, with genuinely biting commentary on capitalist/colonialist mindsets that spares no political side, and a huge slapstick finale that I can only describe as ‘two thumbs up.’

10. Black Bag (dir. Steven Soderbergh)

For a straight forward spy vs spy flick, Black Bag is kind of strangely romantic! And wow, when’s the last time you saw a spy thriller without a goddamn European car chase or a full scale shootout? For that alone I have to give it the extra half star. It’s just an hour and a half of tension for tension’s sake! Brilliant! 

Well acted, fun characters, fun reveals that creep up on you in their intensity and consequence. Cate Blanchett is so great in this, super sweet but deadly. Fassbender also crushing it as the ultimate wife guy. I wish there were more adult films like this in theaters that got all of their thrills from dialogue and blocking.

Honorable Mentions: Die My Love, Frankenstein, Pee-Wee As Himself, Mickey 17, Sinners, 28 Years Later, The Naked Gun, Boys Go to Jupiter, Being Maria