Pajiba's Top Ten Films of 2025!

Another year, another countdown. 2025 is coming to an end and so it's list season, baby! Team Pajiba submitted their ballots into an extremely complicated and secretive system that only I understand, and the results proved once again that democracy is in rude health. We didn't see everything but our list remains 100% objective and correct.

10. THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

'An adventure about bridging the distance between generations, finding a sliver of enlightenment, and of course the joy of large rectangular beards, this is another singular experience from perhaps our most singular movie-maker. And the little slice of Heaven that it manages to dig up in its closing moments is maybe among Wes's most moving stuff to date. As the play-sets keep accruing size and ever more fantastical flourishes, Anderson still never loses sight of the plain simple stuff that matters--a common ground for bespoke characters, resonating far out beyond their exquisite composition.' (Review.)

9. BUGONIA/DIE MY LOVE

'Going into Bugonia you can't help but wonder if on a fifth outing together Lanthimos will still be able to find new prisms of Emma Stone to shine his light through--well wonder no more. Even after her well-deserved Oscar sweep for Poor Things pushed her toward all sorts of fruit-f***ing extremes, this is some hilarious top-of-the-game work from her. And she's met full on by Plemons, the sort of leading man only a Yorgos (or one supposes a Charlie Kaufman) could totally tap into and get what it is that makes him so endlessly riveting. A whole lot of Bugonia is just these two talking, to and at and right by one another, and oh, it sings.' (Review.)

Motherhood is a monster. So shows Jennifer Lawrence in her best performance in years as a woman struggling with postpartum turmoil, geographical isolation, and the growing awareness that the world doesn't give a damn about the likes of her. Lynne Ramsay has long been one of cinema's greatest sensual filmmakers, and her tactile and prickly depictions of trauma are at their most primal in Die My Love. Lawrence and Robert Pattnson let loose, showing the fine line between love and hate as the world closes in on them during the early days of parenthood. 'Raw' doesn't even begin to describe it.

8. PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF

'Yet this documentary, his final red-bow-wrapped gift to us, does accomplish what it and he wanted. He knew he had "some 'splainin' to do" and in so doing you can see the years of dust that had gathered over the bright pure candy heart of Pee-wee being finally brushed away. "Everything I did and wrote was based in love," Reubens says in his final dying message to us, and by doc's end (as the tears choke out of you) you'll know it to be true. The only truth that actually matters.' (Review.)

7. BOB TREVINO LIKES IT

'It's also tremendously warm. It will make you cry -- in a good way -- because it's lovely and touching and sweet and completely wholesome. It's a big giant hug of a movie. When's the last time you watched a movie that made you feel warm and fuzzy? Bob Trevino Likes It will make you feel warm and fuzzy. I do understand it's a hard sell. And that this post will probably be read by a few thousand people and only a handful will ultimately watch it. But those who do, I promise, will also want to share it with people you care about. Good luck trying to sell it to them.' (Review.)

6. EDDINGTON

'Still, for all its unpleasantness, Eddington seems honest and essential to me. It captures the tumult of our politics being rewritten in real time--there is no up, no down, no right, no left, just unrelenting chaos. Pascal's Garcia is his own sort of hypocrite--there's no comfort to be had in Katy Perry needledrops. Not with the dumpsters actively burning. [...] A movie as actively confrontational as Eddington hitting theaters is a minor miracle. That you'll be stifling terrible laughter and choking in revulsion all at once is just the cherry on top.' (Review.)

5. BLACK BAG

'Koepp crafts his dialogue sharp as a shiv, as tender as a kiss to the base of the spine, with everything coming down to further excuses to keep digging deeper into the weird ways that George and Kathryn manage their work-life power-plays. In that way Black Bag kept reminding me of the metaphorical relationship drama at the heart of Phantom Thread--this is very much a movie about middle-aged making-it-work; about what it takes to keep a couple humming away many a year into it. And it sizzles as such. Black Bag is grown-up genre movie-making at its shimmering peak.' (Review.)

4. WEAPONS

'Aunt Gladys is a turn that grants an actor immediate icon status--it's the role you look at and just know will be your obituary headline. It's the kind of feast any actor would suck their vanity between their teeth like soup in exchange for. And Madigan, always a wonderful and reliable force on-screen, slurps and gurgles and giggles and shrieks this sh** to the sky and back. Enjoy your moment, Madigan. You earned it. If there's any reason to re-visit this film over and over again--despite the lapses in logic and fast-forwardable-parts that multiple viewings will make more clear--it's to roll around like a dog in filth in the gleeful malevolence of her, our, forever, inestimable Aunt Gladys.' (Review.)

3. TRAIN DREAMS

'Most of us don't get a happy-ever-after, but everyone experiences moments of joy and pleasure alongside those times of anguish. People will come and go from your life, but all will leave an impression. A film like this so easily could have descended into mawkishness or a self-improvement book club-style moralizing. There were moments when the voiceover veers a tad into overdone or there's maybe one too many gazes into the wilds, but it all comes together so neatly and with such elegance. The ending is such an aching conclusion that it left my screening in tears. I hope Train Dreams is able to find its people amid a crowded season and it is own distributor's mixed priorities. It's not too quiet to dazzle.' (Review.)

2. SINNERS

'The back half of the movie is familiar, a steady whittling down of the characters we love as they recognize the danger on their doorstep and take their last stand. What's unusual is how rapidly they die, sometimes turned off-screen only to reappear in the growing crowd of vampires performing an unlikely Riverdance outside the club, and the action barely pauses to mark their passing. Then again, why linger? Death is inevitable, the movie seems to argue. It's common. If there weren't vampires, then there'd be Klan members at the door. That long, slow first act as we got to know these people's lives? That was what mattered. As one of the two end-credit sequences makes explicit, beauty and tragedy don't cancel each other out. The best day of your life can end in tragedy, and still be the best day of your life. That's the blues, baby.' (Review.)

1. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

'And what a ride. There are already at this moment Film History Books aching for their missing chapters on the three-car chase scene that caps off this cinematic experience. Not only because of how it's filmed--although every camera operator on this film should be bought a beer or drink-of-their-choice for what they accomplished here until the day they die. It's also because we're so entirely emotionally invested in what's happening by this moment in the movie that it's earned every ounce of its show-off-iness. If you don't feel your foot instinctively pressing down on the gas pedal from your theater seat, then you just might be one of those awful Republicans I mentioned earlier. And don't do that, please. Don't make me beg or throw bombs. Just speed us around that next bend and make us feel like there's hope in humanity still, PTA!' (Review.)