The Poppies of Terra #72 - My Top Ten Films of 2025

You’re going to glance at my list and say, “Really, no One Battle After Another? What kind of a nonsense top 10 is this?”

I had the pleasure of watching One Battle After Another in IMAX on release and it was a fantastic experience. It’s a memorable film, memorably made, which will rightly be featured on many end-of-year lists and probably be a heavy hitter at the 2026 Oscars. In a way, preceded by Ari Aster’s barbed Eddington and followed by Luca Guadagnino’s more oblique After the Hunt, I think it forms the heart of 2025’s informal cinematic “Trilogy of Satirical Reflection.” Together these three films take complex, stylized looks at the weaponization of vital social and political issues (pandemic protocols and BLM, white nationalism and immigration, #metoo performative allyship, etc.) while mostly skewering all players and pointing out the hypocrites and foibles of those claiming to be on the right side. But despite One Battle After Another’s numerous merits, it didn’t strike me quite on the same personal level as the top ten films I’ve chosen below.

As I often find myself saying when doing these write-ups, I think 2025 was a good year for cinema, and at some point the cutoff for what goes on my top personal 10 becomes a little arbitrary, because the art exemplified by all these films is so different. So, with all that said, One Battle After Another is certainly worthy, and if I made this list on another day of the week, it might have been on it. But all things being equal, the below selections, I feel, deserve more of a spotlight, and so here we are.

I’ve listed these alphabetically rather than ranking them in any particular order:

• Familiar Touch (dir. Sarah Friedland) - The reality of dementia is its own unreality, a duality of perception that Friedland captures exquisitely in an unadorned yet richly textured narrative debut built around an incredibly subtle but expressive and poignant performance by veteran stage actress Kathleen Chalfant. Gabe C. Elder’s cinematography transforms ordinary spaces, and the inherently designed nature of a nursing home, into mental frames, illuminating the central character’s warm but perpetually drifting consciousness.

• Hallow Road (dir. Babak Anvari) - Kit Fraser’s camera and lighting, along with riveting turns by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, transform a single car interior into a theater of psychology. As the film’s phantasmagorical night unwinds along serpentine country roads, a phone’s display, a GPS map, indicator lights and street lamps all become imbued with tension and meaning, leading to a devastating finale finessed by deliberately rich ambiguity.

• It Was Just An Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi) - Panahi’s handheld urgency and naturalistic performances from a number of amateur actors create an intimacy and immediacy that cross moral complexity with visceral authenticity. This beautiful film is full of pain, rage and the search for redemption, eloquently voicing the eternally unanswerable questions of the wrongfully aggrieved.

• Marty Supreme (dir. Josh Safdie) - Cinematographer Darius Khondji shoots mostly on 35mm film using vintage Panavision anamorphic lenses to recreate a 1950s atmosphere in a madcap, careening, rambunctious, polyphonic, simultaneously digressive but totally focused narrative extravaganza about an obsessive table tennis player. The supporting cast is chock full of New York deep cut character actors, and we’ll be seeing Timothée Chalamet earn plenty of plaudits for his precisely frenzied performance.

• No Other Choice (dir. Park Chan-wook) - This may be the year’s most meticulously composed film, where every scene, and oftentimes beats within a scene, are orchestrated into thrilling visual statements. The magic act is cohering all these moments into an utterly engaging whole that perfectly blends black comedy, satire, slapstick, and absurdism to great literal and symbolic meaning.

• Sentimental Value (dir. Joachim Trier) - Kasper Tuxen’s fluid cinematography and Olivier Bugge Coutté’s editing lend a generational drama centered around creativity and control a confident yet understated visual language. Standout performances by Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård bring wonderful vibrancy to a thoroughly elegant, post-Bergman meditation on the sacrifices and rigors of an artistic life.

• Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler) - The year’s most sumptuous, soulful, sultry and sinuous genre-bending outing, shot by Coogler on 65mm with IMAX cameras, uses elaborate long takes and wide-format cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw to create a lively period piece that, like the music at its heart, transcends its historical moment. Wrapped around a powerhouse dual performance by Michael B. Jordan, horror and the blues were never as carnal, stylish or sexy.

• Sirāt (dir. Oliver Laxe) - What if Camus meditated to the beat of hypnotic EDM? That seems to be the basic tonal fuel to this apocalyptic-feeling, deliriously angst-ridden, supremely stark desert survival drama shot on Super 16mm film on location by Mauro Herce and electro-scored by Kangding Ray. The movie's weave is as granular as the desert itself, and the viewing experience proves as difficult to corral or tame.

• Train Dreams (dir. Clint Bentley) - Floating on cinematography by Adolpho Veloso and music by Bryce Dessner, Joel Edgerton’s minimalist but ultimately heart-rending performance as a man whose life experiences push him outside of time conjures up an unforgettable flight of transcendent, nature-inspired beauty. This movie encompasses the depth of life, and the depth of natural cycles, with quiet wisdom and remarkably restrained aplomb.

• Warfare (dir. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland) - The utterly deromanticized, score-less, jargon-laden clockwork machinery of this recreation of real events is a savagely engineered piece of filmmaking. Dave Thompson’s quasi real-time, documentary camerawork recreates the memories of combat veterans who were on the scene with startlingly immersive and disorienting realism.

And here are thirty Honorable Mentions, also sorted alphabetically:

28 Years Later, Anemone, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Best Wishes to All, Black Bag, Blue Moon, Bring Her Back, Bugonia, Dangerous Animals, Dead of Winter, Die My Love, Dust Bunny, F1, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Jay Kelly, Keeper, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, The Lost Bus, Nouvelle Vague, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Predator: Killer of Killers, Rental Family, The Secret Agent, Sorry, Baby, Sovereign, Twinless, and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story.

With Toy Story 5, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Disclosure Day, Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Project Hail Mary, The Odyssey, Dune: Part 3, and Avengers: Doomsday, among others, 2026 is looking to be a healthy year at the box office, with many exciting smaller releases on the way as well.

And while the Doomsday marketing campaign has already started a countdown for that film’s release, here’s the more important one: only 58 days to go until Scream 7.

Happy New Year everyone!