The 25 Best Films of 2025 We’ve Already Seen

“Friendship” (A24, TBD theatrical release)

Craig Waterman is a middle class suburbanite who works at an office company that makes their clients’ products more addictive — whether those products are apps, foods, or politicians. In lieu of friends, Craig is casual acquaintances with his co-workers, and he looks forward to seeing “the new Marvel” because he hears it’s so crazy that it’s literally driving people insane. His entire wardrobe comes from a company called Ocean View Dining, he’s obsessed with trying the “SEAL Team 6” special at a local restaurant (a 22,000-calorie meal that replicates what its namesake ate after killing Osama Bin Laden), and his wife Tami still kisses their teenage son on the mouth.

From a distance, he might appear to be the most normal man in America, but Craig Waterman is (obviously) played by “I Think You Should Leave” maestro Tim Robinson, so if you look just a little bit closer it snaps into focus that he’s more like an alien impostor who could only figure out how to mimic 99.97 percent of human behavior, and has grown to be completely defined and enraged by the tiny portion that continues to elude him. Then again, that might be the most normal thing about him.

Robinson’s obsessive and volatile (but also hyper-earnest) screen persona so perfectly crystallizes a modern form of impotent male rage that it’s become a language unto itself on the internet, where everyone leads with their id. But Andrew DeYoung’s frequently hilarious “Friendship” — which stretches its star’s comic schtick to multiplex dimensions in a movie that feels very much like a feature-length “I Think You Should Leave” sketch — helps clarify that Robinson’s humor is rooted in confusion more than anything else. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Gazer” (Metrograph Pictures, in theaters February 21)

Imagine if “Baby Driver” was a tragic, music-free exploration of mental decay, and you might be able to start picturing the tensest robbery sequence in “Gazer.” Just like Ansel Elgort’s tinnitus-inflicted getaway driver, Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni) needs to put her headphones in before she tackles a dangerous job. But she’s not blasting Queen or The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

The struggling single mother suffers from dyschronometria, a deteriorating mental condition that leaves her unable to accurately perceive the passage of time. Seconds and minutes seamlessly turn into hours and days in a way that leaves her constantly questioning when she is. It’s a workable, if inconvenient, situation when your biggest fear is missing a doctor’s appointment or zoning out at work.

But when you have a matter of minutes to steal car keys from a dangerous man’s apartment before he comes home, the risks become considerably greater. So she pre-records second-by-second instructions for herself with the hope that she can keep herself in the moment by listening to her own pleas. But when the doorknob turns and she’s forced to hide under the bed, her choreographed plans crumble and she has to plan her escape without a net — or an internal clock. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Grand Tour” (MUBI, TBD)

The spirit of “Sans Soleil” casts a long shadow over Miguel Gomes’ beguiling “Grand Tour,” a less essayistic but similarly atemporal travelogue that sometimes feels almost as indebted to Chris Marker as Gomes’ “Tabu” was to F.W. Murnau. Much like Marker’s 1983 masterpiece, Gomes’ film is propelled by the mysterious frisson that it creates between “exotic” documentary footage and disembodied narration. And much like “Sans Soleil,” “Grand Tour” uses that non-stop voiceover to shape its accompanying images into an abstract story about the elusive relationship between time and memory.

In this case, that story is a love story (of sorts), one that again finds Gomes harkening back to the kind of blinkered colonial romances that were so prevalent in the silent era and the early days of Hollywood. And since a love story requires a tactile anchor for its yearning, Gomes — in stark contrast to Marker — cast a pair of conventionally attractive actors to embody the characters described over the soundtrack.

The first of those characters is Edward (a hollowed but ruggedly handsome Gonçalo Waddington), a civil servant for the British Empire. We meet him in Burma towards the end of 1917, where he receives a telegram from the fiancée he hasn’t seen in seven years; it’s finally time for them to tie the knot, and she’ll be in Rangoon by tomorrow. Edward impulsively decides to make sure that he’s gone before she gets there, and hops the next train going anywhere. It derails, but he emerges from the wreckage with a smile on his face. “What a beautiful morning,” he sighs, happily liberated from the chokehold of a history that he managed to escape in the nick of time. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Kingdom” (Metrograph Pictures, TBD theatrical release)

One of the finest films ever made about organized crime, “The Long Good Friday” (1980) sees the world of a London gangster abruptly destabilized by bomb attacks and murders of his associates. He and his henchmen attempt to uncover the attackers’ identities, all whilst trying not to worry their visitors in town for the weekend, who are members of the American mafia looking to invest in redevelopment in the area. This British mob classic may seem an odd film to evoke up top in a review of a French-language, Corsica-set debut feature. But one of the main strengths of director Julien Colonna’s “The Kingdom” is how it successfully pulls off a loosely similar, paranoia-driven fall-of-an-empire story within the context of a condensed time period.

The time frame in question is not quite as tight as “The Long Good Friday’s” 24-ish hours of mayhem, but instead a few weeks of explosive disruption that commence with the attempted car-bomb murder of an associate. And rather than investors needing to be sheltered from the full truth of what’s going on, “The Kingdom” instead has the daughter of the crime clan leader, who is the film’s main character. Colonna’s film is set in the 1990s, which in real life was a crucial period of upheaval for the island’s social, political and economic prospects, with clan wars on the rise. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Life of Chuck” (Neon, in theaters May 25)

TIFF People’s Choice Award winner “The Life of Chuck” is a departure for Mike Flanagan, in the sense that it’s not technically a horror movie. But it is a Stephen King adaptation, which is very much in the “Doctor Sleep” director’s wheelhouse. And it is haunted: By regret, by memories, and by the snuffing out of an entire internal universe when someone dies. If anything, “The Life of Chuck” just peels back the layer of metaphor and gets straight to the wistfulness that underpins all ghost stories.

Structured around a verse from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” — “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes” — “The Life of Chuck” is told in reverse order from the end of a man’s life to the beginning. It does so in a way that’s surprising enough that it’s best not to discuss it in too much detail; suffice to say that it takes a cosmic approach to the idea of inner worlds. (“Every man and every woman is a star,” to quote Whitman’s fellow literary eccentric Aleister Crowley.) The entire movie isn’t sad, although it does land on a note of genuine pathos. But sentimentality suits Flanagan, whose florid writing style is well matched by the high-concept ideas explored here.

Nick Offerman narrates the opening of each of the film’s three chapters, each of which related in some way to, well, the life of accountant (and surprisingly good dancer) Charles “Chuck” Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston as an adult and Jacob Tremblay as a boy. It’s Zeyde Albie who convinces young Chuck that numbers are just as exciting as moonwalking across the school gym, setting him on a stable, but unexciting life path. “The Life of Chuck” uses dancing as a shorthand for whimsy, creativity, playfulness, joy — name an unselfconscious emotion that we’re supposed to put aside in the name of adult responsibility, and it’s expressed through dancing in this movie. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Luckiest Man in America” (IFC Films and Saban Studio, TBD)

At their best, game shows have always been defined by their juxtaposition of genuine stakes and utter ridiculousness. Audiences see flashing lights, gaudy neon color palettes, and spray-tanned hosts with unconvincingly dyed hair, but contestants see a battlefield where fortunes can be won and lost. Daytime shows revolve around games of chance deemed simple enough to provide the most mindless of background noise while people do chores around the house, but the money involved often has life-changing implications for those involved.

Samir Oliveros’ “The Luckiest Man in America” successfully exploits that tension in its semi-fictionalized telling of Michael Larson’s (Paul Walter Hauser) record shattering 1984 win on “Press Your Luck,” in which he took home over $110,000 by figuring out that the show’s seemingly randomized wheel spins were all based on the same five light patterns. Unfolding almost exclusively on the CBS lot where the game show was taped, the film treats the producers’ quest to figure out his impossible knack for the game with all the seriousness of a Secret Service counterfeiting operation.

At the same time, its candy colored set and ’80s game show kitsch prevent audiences from ever forgetting about the asininity of the setting. It all combines to form a delightfully sleazy ensemble thriller that goes down easy in 90 minutes — and yet another reminder that Hauser is one of his generation’s most interesting movie stars. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Misericordia” (Sideshow and Janus Films, TBD theatrical release)

Alain Guiraudie returned to Cannes with a bittersweet and unexpectedly warmhearted dark comedy about latent homosexual desire, “Miséricordia.” Remember, the French writer/director is the filmmaker behind the 2013 perverse gay classic “Stranger by the Lake,” a simmering and sinister cruising tale about how our drives toward death and sex are of the same flesh. “Miséricordia,” which debuted in the Cannes Premiere section, is a decidedly lighter-on-its-feet (in all senses of the idiom) story of a lonely and faithless man’s obsession with his dead former boss, who’s also the father of the childhood best friend he maybe once loved.

When Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to Saint-Martial, a provincial village nestled in a wood in Southern France, he immediately bonds with his former boss’ widow, Martine (Catherine Frot). Is it romantic obsession, or projecting a mother figure upon her? Or is Jérémie really in love with her dead husband, and so she’s now the replacement?

Meanwhile, Martine’s now-grown son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), is jealous of Jérémie and his mother’s relationship and may see it as a betrayal of their childhood friendship. Circumstances go awry, disappearance and murder are introduced, and Jérémie attaches himself to a geriatric bishop (Jacques Develay), and an unlikely bond, or at least a confidence between them, blooms. We won’t spoil the details. Read IndieWire’s Cannes interview with Alaine Guiraudie.

“Parthenope” (A24, in theaters February 7)

It’s no secret that Paolo Sorrentino is profoundly obsessed with the topics of youth and great beauty. Such preoccupations — and several more! — are self-evident in films like “Youth” and “The Great Beauty,” two unbridled displays of Italian maximalism that are every bit as subtle as their titles suggest. Sorrentino is back on his proverbial bullshit with another sprawling flesh parade that’s more consumed with abstract ideals than it is with the stuff of life itself. Once again, he returns with a rapturously sumptuous film that blurs the line between the sacred and the profane until sex feels like religion and religion feels like sex, and once again he’s compelled by the siren’s song of youth and great beauty.

With “Parthenope,” which borrows its name from one of the sirens of Greek myth, Sorrentino is unusually preoccupied with the relationship between youth and great beauty. This isn’t the first time that he’s pitted those twin intoxicants against each other, contrasting the ephemeral nature of human lust against the eternal spirit of the poetry, architecture, and deities we create in retaliation to that fact. In “Parthenope,” however, the 53-year-old filmmaker dares to ask whether it’s possible to separate the two. More to the point: He questions whether people are capable of fully appreciating them both at the same time. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Pavements” (MUBI, TBD)

The question Alex Ross Perry asked himself before embarking on the mad, four-faced project that is “Pavements” was: “What if Pavement was the most important band of all time?” It’s a fun idea, and Perry’s commitment to the bit cannot be questioned. An off-Broadway jukebox musical named after their breakthrough debut studio album “Slanted and Enchanted,” a fake “Bohemian Rhapsody”-style biopic starring Joe Keery and Jason Schwartzman, a museum exhibition Perry helped devise and that brims with mostly unimportant memorabilia, and an actual documentary all exist in service of “Pavements.”

If the assignment in making a film about Pavement was part sincere, part fuck-you, a dash of incoherent anti-establishment thought and a tablespoon of self-indulgence, “Pavements” understands it perfectly. Making a film about the band any other way seems like a complete waste of time.

Perry frames Pavement as a protest band, and that’s sort of true. Lead singer Stephen Malkmus and guitarist Scott Kannberg (more often known as “Spiral Stairs”) formed the band after college, eventually recruiting Bob Nastanovich, Mark Ibold, and, finally, Steve West, who replaced Gary Young on drums after their first album. Pavement were a college kid’s band, and they were certainly left of center (more recently, Malkmus has been a noisy Bernie Sanders supporter), but their lyrics were never really political. It’s hard to figure out, even now, what many are about. Seek deep subtext, and you’ll rarely find it. The manifesto didn’t matter, and Pavement didn’t stand for anything, just against It. The shrug was kind of the point. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Presence” (Neon, in theaters January 24)

The presence of a camera changes things. Trained actors aside, most people are uncomfortable enough with the knowledge that there’s a lens in their face that they’ll change their behavior in turn. Ghosts, meanwhile, observe without being noticed, with only a few sensitive souls able to discern them at all. Steven Soderbergh’s latest cinematic experiment conflates the two, filming a haunted house story from the perspective of the spirit.

Ghosts are tied to a location, and so is “Presence.” The film takes place entirely within the confines of a handsome, century-old home — the furthest the characters get is the driveway, which the camera observes anxiously through a window like a dog awaiting its family’s return. The film unfolds in a series of single takes, which follow characters through the house and watch them from the closets and corners of various rooms. When an object floats across the room, the camera moves with it; when characters talk to each other, it pivots back and forth between them.

The first-person point of view, continuous tracking shots, and complete lack of reverse shots give “Presence” the feel of a video game or an immersive VR experience. The fact that it still works as a movie is a testament to the cohesion of the cast and crew, with Soderbergh serving as a camera operator as well as director. It’s not quite a found footage movie — again, the camera isn’t really a camera, but the eyes of a “presence” in the home. But it plays like one, stringing together snippets of conversation and isolated events separated by a few frames of black. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Riefenstahl” (Kino Lorber Films, TBD theatrical release)

For some problematic filmmakers there’s the mental task of “separating the art from the artist.” And then there are the intellectual hurdles you need to jump over for an aesthetic appreciation of Leni Riefenstahl. The Nazi propagandist was absolutely a technical innovator, especially with her multi-hour documentary portrait of the 1936 Olympics, “Olympia” — outright establishing tropes for filming sports for movies and TV ever since, with the use of a narrator, slow-motion, unique camera placements (including from a hot-air balloon), and crowd reaction shots. The problem is that many of those crowd reaction shots focus on Adolf Hitler.

And that’s even before you consider “Triumph of the Will,” Riefenstahl’s documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg that unambiguously frames Hitler in low-angle shots against the sky as a heroic figure. Or the well-documented fact that she may have been his favorite filmmaker, and that they spent significant time together. That she did more to glorify and popularize the Nazi regime on film than anyone else.

With his new documentary “Riefenstahl,” Andres Veiel sets out to offer a different perspective on its subject: Glorify her at your peril. Working with producer Sandra Maischberger, who gained access to Riefenstahl’s estate following the director’s death in 2003 and the death of her life partner in 2016, Veiel constructs a narrative showing how Riefenstahl’s warm reception in the decades after the end of World War II is something she actively cultivated herself. And many bought it. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Shrouds” (Sideshow and Janus Films, TBD theatrical release)

Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife, “The Shrouds” is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect? I suppose it’s possible that the story’s deeply personal context might have spurred Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his recent features, or even dare to expose the soft underbelly that’s always been hiding inside his tumorous body of work and its many layers of scary-beautiful new flesh. If so, it almost immediately becomes clear that he had zero interest in accepting that invitation.

A quintessentially late film from an artist who’s always been ahead of his time, “The Shrouds” is Cronenberg at his most inhospitable; so far as the project’s emotional availability and commercial appeal are concerned, it makes “Crimes of the Future” seem like “Barbie” by comparison. And yet, as with so many of Cronenberg’s most resonant movies, its morgue-like coldness eventually reveals itself to be deeply comforting to some degree — if not while you’re watching it, then perhaps as its big ideas begin to seep into your bone marrow during the days and weeks that follow.

Between its paranoid scramble of a plot and a protagonist who becomes increasingly difficult to see as anything more than an avatar for its auteur, “The Shrouds” lends itself to a sort of delayed appreciation; its story only makes sense with the detached perspective that might begin to develop in the time between the death of a loved one and the funeral service at which they’re laid to rest. Body is reality, Cronenberg likes to say, but what becomes of that reality when the body in question is buried six feet under the ground? Read IndieWire’s full review.

“On Swift Horses” (Sony Pictures Classics, TBD theatrical release)

“A gambler only has one obligation: to keep himself informed.”

When Julius (Jacob Elordi) dispenses this wisdom to his sister-in-law Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) he’s ostensibly talking about cheating in card games. But in “On Swift Horses,” his words cause ripples beneath the surface in a makeshift family where nearly everyone is living a lie. He’s a gambler addicted to the highs of life, traversing desert casinos to chase the thrill of stealing a quick buck and fleeting connections with gay lovers. And she’s a married woman whose attraction to other women is becoming harder and harder to ignore, prompting her to start betting on horses to fund the kind of double life she’s starting to suspect she’ll need. Like moths to dueling flames, they were always drawn to each other in a relationship that blurred the line between familial and sexual — but as the two gamblers keep their eyes peeled for information, each begins to suspect that the other might share in their most closely-guarded secret.

Elordi and Edgar-Jones seamlessly embody the two lost souls, each playing to their own strengths while remaining connected by an invisible thread of common pain. Elordi plays the strong and silent type, flaunting his sexy facade while revealing endless amounts of pain behind his eyes. And Edgar-Jones’ Muriel is a carefully manufactured persona that’s always walking on eggshells, never quite being her true self for the fear that a shadow lurking around the corner might be waiting to catch her in the act. Yet the joy that both emit when they’re together, even in platonic moments, fills them with a sense of agency and humanity that often evades characters in queer period pieces that lean too heavily on suffering porn. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Việt and Nam” (Strand Releasing, TBD theatrical release)

The second feature — excluding a credit in an anthology — by writer/director Truong Minh Quy (“The Tree House”), “Viet and Nam” is a queer romance that has proved controversial back home not for its characters, but reportedly for its portrayal of “a gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view” about the country and its citizens, according to an official letter from Vietnam’s Cinema Department.

While far from the cheeriest of movies, this is a curious fate for a sensitive, transfixing drama that further showcases the talents of one of Vietnam’s most exciting modern filmmakers. The film is seemingly set in 2001, as someone references watching the news that morning and seeing a plane hitting a skyscraper in New York. But among the cited influences on the feature’s inception is an incident from 2019, when 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Essex, England. Emigration through trafficking is lined up for one of the film’s leads, though an ominous, abstract prologue sets a doom-laden tone for the eventual trip not going to plan.

Shot on 16mm, the film opens on near-pitch black, as what almost looks like snowflakes begin falling as the sound of feet trudging through water can be heard. A young man appears from the darkness, slowly making his way diagonally across the screen from the top-right corner to the bottom-left one. As he gets closer, his breathing sounding heavier, we see he is carrying a shirtless man on his back; both men appear to be smeared in a black substance. We can’t tell exactly where these two are, nor properly see the water making that noise as steps are made, but it’s very clear that this location is flooding. Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Vulcanizadora” (Factory 25, TBD)

Life comes for us all, even slacker filmmakers. Michigan-based indie stalwart Joel Potrykus has always explored loneliness in his work, but his latest, “Vulcanizadora,” plumbs a particular middle-aged variant. This is the alienation of divorced dads becoming estranged from their kids; the existential hell of knowing that you’ve made mistakes and that there’s nothing you can do to change them. In some ways, this is Potrykus’ version of “No Exit.”

To underline the passage of time, “Vulcanizadora” revives the characters Potrykus and his muse Joshua Burge played in 2014’s “Buzzard.” Ten years later, Marty Jackitansky (Burge) and Derek Skiba (Potrykus) are the same overgrown adolescents they once were, even as their circumstances have changed. Sometime in the past decade, Derek got married, had a kid, and then got divorced. Meanwhile, Marty’s petty crimes have escalated, with consequences that are harder to escape than those of his check-fraud scheme in “Buzzard.”

For its first half hour, “Vulcanizadora” is a typical Potrykus hangout movie, following Marty and Derek as they hike out into the woods towards an unclear destination. If you pay attention, Potrykus and Burge reveal clues as to what, exactly, these guys are doing out here as they walk — aside from blowing up M-80s and digging up moldy porno mags, of course. But these hints get swept away in the river of endearingly pathetic cool-guy banter that flows out of Potrykus’ mouth. Burge, his face as expressive as always, mostly just listens. Read IndieWire’s full review.

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