As the curtains draw on 2025, film critics and cinephiles alike are taking stock of a year that delivered everything from haunting meditations on loss to blockbuster spectacles—and, as ever, plenty of heated debate. The year’s cinematic landscape, shaped by shifting industry tides and a world still grappling with uncertainty, offered up a remarkable range of stories. But what truly lingered in the minds of audiences and critics? The answer, it seems, depends on whom you ask—and how deeply you’re willing to wade into the swirling currents of taste, theme, and cultural resonance.
On December 27, 2025, Daniel Reynolds, writing for Brieftake, unveiled his personal top ten films of the year, a list marked by both pleasure and discomfort, but united by their staying power. Among his selections were Carson Lund’s introspective Eephus, Ari Aster’s unsettling Eddington, and Steven Soderbergh’s sly Black Bag. But towering above them all was Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which Reynolds described as a film “worth fighting for”—the kind of movie he returned to after a taxing day, seeking solace and perspective. His list also nodded to honorable mentions like 28 Years Later and Pee-wee as Himself, underscoring the breadth of this year’s cinematic offerings.
Reynolds wasn’t alone in his praise for One Battle After Another. Jose Solís, in a sweeping thematic analysis for America Magazine, found that the most resonant films of 2025 shared a “compelling thread: the human impulse to rescue.” Solís drew connections between seemingly disparate works—Weapons, Sirāt, Arco, and The Voice of Hind Rajab—all of which, he argued, explored the “missions of care and risk, journeys propelled by desperation, loyalty and, above all, hope.” In One Battle After Another, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Bob shelters his daughter Willa in a forested refuge, only to face the incursion of violence and loss. The film’s narrative, Solís noted, is almost mythic, evoking “the urgency of defending freedom from ideological violence” and the “transmission of care from the mother’s womb to her baby.”
Other films, like Weapons, used their stories to probe the darker edges of societal neglect. Josh Brolin’s portrayal of Archer Graff—a father searching for his missing son among 17 vanished children—unfolds in a town steeped in apathy and fear. The film’s surreal, nightmare-like atmosphere, as Solís described, “echoes the real-life anxieties of a world which neglects its young.” The rescue mission is anything but straightforward, as shifting perspectives and moral ambiguity keep the audience on edge, underscoring the fragility of innocence and the weight of bearing witness.
Meanwhile, Sirāt and Arco offered more intimate, if no less poignant, explorations of rescue and care. Sirāt follows a father and son’s desperate search for a missing daughter in the Moroccan desert, their journey a blend of memory, dream, and survival. The film’s hypnotic sequences and depiction of nomadic communities speak to feelings of abandonment and the struggle to endure. Arco, an animated feature, shifts the focus to two quasi-orphaned children in a future where parents are holograms. Their bond—expressed in small acts of generosity—becomes a quiet testament to the politics of caring without expectation, a theme Solís connects to the writings of bell hooks and Rebecca Solnit: “To hope is to give yourself to the future—and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
But not all critics were swept up in the year’s prevailing winds. Alex Maidy, in a sharply opinionated piece for JoBlo, took aim at what he saw as the most overrated films of 2025. His list, published on December 27, bristled with contrarian takes. Maidy dismissed Alex Garland’s Warfare as a technical marvel lacking in insight, compared to the director’s 2024 work Civil War. He lambasted The Fantastic Four: First Steps for its underdeveloped villains and poor CGI, suggesting it arrived too late to make a real impact. Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch remake, despite grossing a billion dollars, was branded the “worst Disney remake to date,” a symptom, Maidy argued, of Hollywood’s creative exhaustion when it comes to reimagining animated classics.
Perhaps most pointedly, Maidy took issue with the widespread acclaim for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. While acknowledging Michael B. Jordan’s dual performance and the film’s epic scale—bolstered by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography and Ludwig Goransson’s score—he argued that Sinners was “a good movie, just not the best of the year.” In Maidy’s view, it was little more than “a 1930s-set twist on From Dusk Till Dawn,” elevated by a year of underwhelming studio blockbusters but not truly deserving of its top-tier status. This stance stood in stark contrast to Reynolds, who called Sinners “big” and memorable, and whose list placed it among the year’s most impactful works.
Maidy’s skepticism extended to the pop phenomenon KPop Demon Hunters, which he described as “an idea only half-executed.” Despite its infectious soundtrack and cultural ubiquity, the film, he argued, felt like “the pilot for an ongoing series rather than a fully realized feature,” lacking the narrative depth to sustain repeat viewings. These criticisms, Maidy insisted, were not meant to provoke for provocation’s sake, but to encourage honest debate about what truly makes a film great.
Amidst these clashing perspectives, what emerges is a portrait of a film year defined by risk, rescue, and reckoning—on-screen and off. The best films of 2025, according to Reynolds and Solís, were those that dared to grapple with the ethical imperatives of hope, love, and protection, whether through grand spectacle or quiet intimacy. They insisted that action and empathy are not abstract virtues, but lived realities: “To seek, to carry, to fight for another is to embody a hope that is active, tangible and necessary.”
Yet, as Maidy’s counterpoints remind us, the conversation about cinema’s value and impact remains far from settled. For every film that one critic finds transcendent, another may see only missed opportunities or creative fatigue. In a year marked by industry upheaval and shifting audience expectations, perhaps the most enduring legacy of 2025’s films is their invitation to argue, reflect, and—above all—keep watching. After all, as the credits roll and the lights come up, the real work of cinema begins: in the minds and hearts of those still pondering what it all means.
