Top Ten Favorite Films of 2025

Happy Oscar Day!

This is the first time I haven't been tracking the Oscar race.  I'm usually really good about predicting winners and I get super into it.  This is my Super Bowl after all!  But for some reason, this year, I'm kinda just sitting on the sidelines, excited to watch the show.  So I have zero predictions or expectations for the ceremony tonight!

But as per tradition, here are my Top Ten Favorite Films of 2025. 

10. Friendship

 

Not sure if many caught this one.  It stars Tim Robinson as Craig, who is super awkward and has a lot of trouble making friends until he meets Austin, played by the forever charming Paul Rudd.  Austin accepts Craig's friendship until Craig's clingy and often times inappropriate behavior starts crossing the line.  It's like a darker, sadder version of Paul Rudd's other film about male friendships, I Love You Man.  Friendship relies very heavily on cringe comedy, which I totally dig, but if that's not your thing, then maybe you want to skip this one.

9. Lilo & Stitch

 

Disney finally did it!  They finally made a good live action version of one of their animated movies!  Lilo & Stitch was super enjoyable and the little girl who plays Lilo is too adorable for words!  I think the reason why this live action version works is because it's grounded in reality, specifically Hawaii, a place we are familiar with, rather than Aladdin's fictional Agrabah or King Triton's underwater kingdom.  As a big fan of the original animated film, I was pleasantly surprised with this one, and had a great time watching it.

8. Frankenstein

This film is gorgeous, moody, and so perfectly stylish.  Guillermo Del Toro and Frankenstein are a match made in goth aesthetic heaven!  I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off as well.  Probably the best Frankenstein film adaptation to date.  It's been many decades since I've read Frankenstein, but I do remember that the monster is supposed to be an observant, intelligent, and curious creature who wants to learn about humans and the world he was brought into.  He is not the violent, monosyllabic, ogre that other adaptations make him out to be.  In this respect, Jacob Elordi's performance nails it.  He is perfection as the monster - and not to mention weirdly hot lol!

7. Sinners

 

I am hoping for a Michael B. Jordan win!  This movie was wild!  I usually don't like horror/zombie films, but Sinners is so good that the zombie thing didn't bother me.  This was probably the most stylishly shot movie of 2025.  I especially loved that dancing scene where ancestors and decedents from past, present, and future came together for celebration.  That was one of the coolest scenes I've seen in a film in a very long time!  I also hope Ryan Coogler wins for Best Director!  He managed to make a horror movie that is highly entertaining and important.

6. Hamnet

I loved the book and I was so excited to watch the film.  The film is really good, but there's one major difference between the book and the movie that I wish the movie would have leaned into more.  William Shakespeare is hardly in the book.  In fact his name is not mentioned once.  The book is all about Agnes; it's from her point of view, and most of the story is about how Will left her alone with the children like 99% of the time.  It almost never goes into Will's struggles about needing a creative outlet, but instead deep dives into Agnes's struggles of being basically a single mom living with her in laws in the 14th/15th Century.  That is what I loved about the book.  Agnes was the star.  Agnes is still the star in Hamnet, but we are missing a lot about her youth and background.  I wish the film had less Will and more Agnes.  But if I were to pretend the book didn't exist and watched Hamnet as a stand alone form of media, then I can't deny that it's pretty much a masterpiece of a film.

5. Sentimental Value

I loved how subtle this film was.  It's about generational trauma, how we sometimes hurt the ones we love the most, and don't always know how to make it right as much as we want to.  Regardless of the emotional subject matter, the movie never falls to melodrama or gets too sappy.  That's a testament to how good the writing is, and how good the actors are!  Pretty much the entire cast is up for acting nominations and deservedly so.  Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav, absent father to Nora and Agnes (played brilliantly by Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).  When the girls' mother dies, Gustav unexpectedly shows up at the funeral after not having seen the girls in decades, and decides that he wants to be a part of their lives.  Not only that, he has written a film about their family trauma that he wants Nora, an actor, to star in.  The audacity!  This film is all about the writing and the acting and I hope it wins Best Original Screenplay!

4. The Naked Gun

I feel silly putting this movie on my list, but it made me laugh out loud several times!  It may have been the funniest movie I saw from 2025.  I hate how much I liked this stupid, stupid movie!  Liam Neeson plays the son of Leslie Neilsen's character from the the original Naked Gun movies.  Pamela Anderson plays the sexy femme fatale.  The film does a great job capturing the spirit of the original movies, which I loved as a kid.  The same slapstick sense of humor and ridiculous punchlines.  I love seeing both Liam Neeson and Pam Anderson doing comedy and excelling so well in it.  If you want to spend an evening laughing at a brainless movie, I couldn't recommend The Naked Gun any more.

3. Zootopia 2

I was skeptical about Zootopia 2 because the sequel is never as good as the original.  I still like the original better, but the sequel is pretty good!  In this film, Judy the rabbit and Nick the fox are now police partners investigating a case that answers the question, Why doesn't Zootopia have any reptiles?  The deeper they dig, the closer they get to uncovering an evil scheme that took place 100 years ago.  Spoiler alert: it's gentrification.  The reptiles have been pushed out of Zootopia and live in the swampy outskirts.  I loved that the reptiles were portrayed basically as bayou people.  It was hilarious and genius.  The first Zootopia was on regular rotation at my house when it first came out, and although the second one probably won't be, I still enjoyed it a lot.

2. Bugonia

I expected this to be weird AF and it was in fact weird AF.  Yorgos and Emma are at it again!  This time Jesse Plemons joins the team as a conspiracy theorist who believes Emma's character, a powerful CEO, is an alien sent from her home planet to destroy Earth.  He kidnaps her, holds her hostage in his basement, and attempts to torture her into confessing.  Every single one of Yorgos Lanthimos's films have made me uncomfortable and this was no different.  But it's the kind of discomfort that makes strange and meaningful art!  Even though I'm rooting for Rose Bryne, it would be awesome if Emma took home her third Oscar for this!  I mean she had her head shaved on camera for goodness sake!

1. Rental Family

This is my favorite version of Brendan Fraser.  Sweet, sentimental, and full of heart.  Brendan plays Phillip, a washed up American actor living in Japan.  He accepts a unique job offer working for a company that hires people to play certain roles in real life: A mourner at a funeral; a journalist interviewing an aging actor who longs to tell his story; and the most heart wrenching of all, a father to a little girl.  Japan is a wacky place, and apparently these kinds of services actually exist!  As Phillip becomes more involved in his "jobs" he begins to have a deep dilemma about the morality of what he is doing.  However his boss keeps assuring him that in Japan, hiring actors for your own personal life is perfectly acceptable.  This is a lovely film that made me tear up quite a bit.  I wish it had received more attention.

My thoughts on the rest of the Best Picture nominated films:

The Secret Agent - Talk about a slow burn!  It took me about half the film to understand the story and what exactly was going on.  Not that it was confusing, it's that the story revealed itself very slowly!  That doesn't mean it was bad - it was good! - just...not what I was expecting at all!

F1 - This was a really fun movie that I enjoyed, however, I think you needed a certain level of knowledge of F1 racing to truly appreciate it, which I do not have, so I think I missed a lot of the nuances.

One Battle After Another - Leo is of course great, but I didn't really dig this one.  It was good, but not my cup of tea.  Sean Penn was phenomenal though and I hope he wins tonight!

Marty Supreme - Didn't see it

Train Dreams - A gorgeous film that has super strong Terrence Malick vibes.  I liked this one a lot, and the only reason why it didn't make my favorites list is because I needed just a little more from it.