Chris Reed’s Top 10 Films of 2025

It always amazes me how different a given year’s selection of films can be. Sometimes, I find the bulk of the big-studio offerings unbearable and so my Top 10, as a result, features many more indie and foreign selections, while at other times my picks run more of a gamut. In 2014, I even had a Marvel movie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) on the list. 2025 saw some solid, entertaining blockbusters (Superman and The Fantastic Four: The First Steps did good box office and I liked more in them than I disliked). Still, only one such selection, Sinners, made it into the group below, although I also really dug Predator: Badlands.

Below you will find 10 films—5 documentaries and 5 narrative fiction, as per my usual—taken from the longer list (of 10 and 10) I already posted over at the website Hammer to Nail (HtN). It is never easy to whittle that total from 20 to 10, and some of it is arbitrary. All the titles have had some kind of release, whether on a streamer or in theaters. There’s a lot I saw at festivals that has yet to come out for the general public that I also loved, but this particular list leaves them off. Some of the yet-to-be-released films may also end up on the longer list on my blog.

With one exception, I have already reviewed the movies on the list, and so link to those reviews, whether on this site or at HtN. They are listed alphabetically, rather than in order of preference. I also include a capsule summary of the one film I did not review. Enjoy!

• Coexistence, My Ass! (Amber Fares)

• Cutting Through Rocks (Mohammadreza Eyni/Sara Khaki)

• Holding Liat (Brandon Kramer)

• Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou)

• Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (Liane-Cho Han/Maïlys Vallade)

• Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (Shoshannah Stern)

• Rental Family (Hikari)

• Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

• Sinners (Ryan Coogler): Starring Michael B. Jordan in dual roles as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, Ryan Coogler’s genre masterpiece includes an impressive supporting cast, as well, including Jayme Lawson, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell, Hailee Steinfeld, and newcomer Miles Caton. It’s the best kind of horror thriller, where the tropes of a seemingly familiar narrative are adapted and tweaked to become something more than the sum of their parts. It accomplishes what the best genre storytelling can, which is to place the context of the real world under a cinematic magnifying glass, shining a light on important topics while also entertaining the hell out of us. Coogler (Black Panther) is no stranger to this approach, and here he shows just what an exceptional filmmaker he is, making not only one of the best films of the year, but a work of art that is both timely and timeless. May these vampires live forever.

• Teenage Wasteland (Amanda McBaine/Jesse Moss)