A few years ago, I was surprised to realize that I’d watched enough movies to be able to compile a short list of favorites. I’d already gotten out of the habit of going to the theaters even before the pandemic hit, and there’s seemed like less and less incentive to put up with the hassle (or pay for an AMC subscription) for what seemed to be pretty mediocre output.
It might be just because I’ve been forcing myself to get out of the house more in 2025, but it seems like this has been an unusually good year for movies overall. I’ve already got a list of favorites longer than the past several years, and it’s still just the beginning of June. I have seen a couple of duds that were so unremarkable I didn’t even have anything interesting to say about them, but it probably says something that even the movie I disliked the most (so far) wasn’t so bad that it was boring.
So I’m going to jump the gun and point out my favorites. Maybe it’ll be interesting to see how many of these are still my favorites at the end of the year?
10. Drop
Really, this is exactly the kind of movie that makes me glad I got the AMC subscription, since otherwise, I would’ve made a point to watch it at home and then most likely never followed through. It’s a solid thriller that feels deliberately old-school in spite of being all about text messaging.
I don’t even know that I’d rate this in my favorite Wes Anderson movies, but it was a relief to see something that didn’t feel like he’d just made it for himself and was actively trying to throw me off. There’s such a level of artistry and imagination in these movies — Korda’s visions of heaven are fantastic — that it’d be a drag to just dismiss them as cliches or affectations.
Especially after Brave New World earlier in the year, it was a pleasant surprise to see an MCU movie that seemed to be aware of MCU fatigue and wanted to try something genuinely different. It still uses the same template, and honestly it’s still 80%-90% carried by Florence Pugh, but I appreciated seeing a big-budget action movie tackling topics like grief and depression in a way that was still very comic-book inspired, but didn’t feel overly trite or mawkish.
7. Black Bag
I still think it’s too talky, if I’m being honest, and feels too much like a fantasy for rich middle-aged people, but it is very smart and just fantastically put together. Like I said before, I wish I’d just stopped protesting from the start and trusted Steven Soderbergh to be a masterful storyteller.
Coming out of this, I liked but didn’t love it, but still found myself very moved by it. And again, the scenes at the end of Act 3 are so fantastic, simultaneously scary and beautiful. Thinking about it even more, I realized that there’s more to it than I’d originally given it credit for. I’m still thinking about it, and I suspect that it feels straightforward, and a little sentimental and Forrest Gump-ish on the surface, but has more profound ideas underneath.
5. Ballerina
I only saw it a couple days ago and already bumped my 3 1/2 stars up to 4. It’s just a fantastic action movie, with fight scenes that surprised me in ways I believed were no longer possible. And I really do think that the almost-corny simplicity of its story, and the fact that Ana de Armas’s character is practically a blank slate, are strengths, not weaknesses.
I saw this before the other two Paddington movies, and I kept hearing people say that the third wasn’t as magical. Now that I’ve seen them all, I can see where they’re coming from, but I still absolutely love this. It doesn’t feel like a departure from the first two movies so much as a celebration of them. The ideas get a little bit diluted by removing them from London and making them more universal, but it’s still so joyful and so wonderfully heartfelt, with fantastic performances from everyone.
3. Final Destination: Bloodlines
I’ve seen it twice now, and it is unquestionably the best movie in the franchise. It’s long felt like I love the concept of the Final Destination movies more than the execution, and this one finally got it exactly right. The tone is so hard to get perfect: it has to be funny, but not too silly, and gruesome, but not torturous or nihilistic. You have to be at least a bit invested in the characters, but not so much that it feels ghoulish to watch them get killed. I could tell that Bloodlines got the tone right when a shot of a kid being smashed into a bloody pulp by a grand piano made me laugh out loud.
2. Sinners
What’s this?! Not even halfway through the year and there’s already an upset?!
Sinners may technically be the best movie of 2025, but it’s not my favorite. I was so happy to see that it worked so well, and especially happy to see that so many people got it, and it seemed to be such a financial success. And again, the “Magic What We Do” scene is simply one of the best moments in cinema.
But — and this is just the barest criticism of a movie I think is outstanding — since I’ve seen it, it feels like it’s contracting in my mind, instead of expanding. I learned a lot about not just the music used in the movie, but more about the history of Black and Asian people in the southeast US than I’d known before. But the second time I saw it, it felt just a little smaller. As if it did such a good job expressing itself that I got almost all of it in the first viewing, and each subsequent one would be diminishing returns.
1. Companion
Which is a big part of why Companion is my favorite movie of the year (so far). It was already perfectly on my wavelength when I first saw it — funny, clever, creepy, and kind of mean — but has just taken up more and more space in my mind in the time since I’ve seen it. It’s a near-perfect screenplay, where I can’t think of a single wasted scene.
I also love what I think is its most novel idea: that we own the love we have for people and the love we give to people, no matter who they turn out to be, and no matter what they choose to do with it.