The 10 Best Movies of 2025 (So Far)

Criminally underrated. Written by Nicholas Pileggi and directed by Barry Levinson, it’s no “GoodFellas” or “Bugsy,” but it’s a bracing true-life drama — intricate in its violence, layered in its sociopathology — that carves out a place in the arena of Mob manners and mores. It’s about the gangsters you used to see in tabloid-newspaper photographs — the old men in glasses and fedoras who ruled the Italian underworld in the ’50s and ’60s. Robert De Niro plays two of them, and though he was raked over the coals for it (“Why couldn’t they just get two different actors?”), what De Niro brings off in this astonishing double performance is an acting master class. As Frank Costello, he’s fatally civilized (courtly, political, trying to live in the real world), while his Vito Genevese is the selfish hothead firecracker. It’s the familiar Charlie/Johnny Boy, Michael/Sonny split, which De Niro, embodying these Mobster frenemies, elevates into a nearly mystical portrait of the underworld id and ego. Yes, the film was a big bomb, indicating that the slow-burn Mafia blood opera is no longer a money genre. But let’s call “The Alto Knights” its riveting swan song. —Owen Gleiberman

At last count, James Bond had slept with 60 women over the course of the 007 franchise, which makes him a very different spy from Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse, who is fiercely, unwaveringly faithful to his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). The feeling is mutual, as the married agents prioritize their relationship above all else, including saving the world — which is why it comes as such a disappointment to George to realize that his wife could be a mole in Steven Soderbergh’s elegant, intelligent and ruthlessly efficient thriller. Speaking of Bond, Pierce Brosnan pops up as the couple’s boss in a movie that delivers all the intrigue you’d expect from the genre, in addition to a perceptive case study on how successful marriages work: A little secrecy keeps things spicy, so long as both parties can fully trust one another. Violate that, and you stand to destroy not just the union, but the entire Western World. —Peter Debruge

The rare horror movie unnerving enough to disturb your sleep. Its creep factor begins with Sally Hawkins’ impishly disturbing performance as a foster mother from hell, who takes a couple of orphaned siblings — 17-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) and his legally blind sister, Piper (Sora Wong) — under her broken wing. She’s already got another foster kid (a mute scowling demon-angel with a thing for self-mutilation), as well as a backstory, glimpsed on murky VHS tapes, set in a gruesome cult. That may all sound a bit overloaded, but “Bring Her Back” lurches forward with the warped psychedelic logic of a wounded dream. In their second feature, the Australian YouTube-horror-comedy-pranksters-turned-filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou (“Talk to Me”) find terrifying ways to get under your skin, pushing everything to the brink of transgression, using domestic trauma to create a symphonic projection of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, all sealed by Hawkins’ gargoyle grin of evil. ­—OG

Yes, it’s too long, and not every scene is honed to perfection. Yet there’s a dread-soaked undertow to the eighth “M:I” film that infuses Ethan Hunt’s spirit of improvisatory action with tangible danger. The movie is an existential face-off with the end of the world, as the sinister threat presented by the Entity — a nightmare of AI gone wild — raises the stakes of suspense. In the memorable sequence where Hunt tracks down the Entity’s source code by drifting through the carcass of a wrecked submarine, it’s as if our heartbeats were synced to the suspended animation of underwater peril. And Tom Cruise’s performance is never just about navigating the spy game. He creates an emotional hurtle through the unforeseen, culminating in an extended aerial stunt sequence of such “No, this can’t be happening…OMG, it actually is” spectacle that the scary thrill of it completes the film’s meaning. What Ethan Hunt will do to save the world is identical to what Tom Cruise will do to save movies. —OG

As America braces for the prospect of another foreign war, the message of U.S. Army veteran Kyle Hausmann-Stokes’ activist-minded drama seems more relevant than ever: Society doesn’t do enough to help those who’ve served their country to acclimate back to civilian life. It’s been a bumpy adjustment for Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green), who blames herself for the death of fellow soldier Zoe (Natalie Morales). During their tour of duty in Afghanistan, the pair swore they’d always have each other’s backs. Now Merit is haunted by her guilt. As vivacious a ghost as you’re likely to meet, Zoe pops up at inopportune times, making jokes and interfering with Merit’s ability to share in group therapy sessions (overseen by Morgan Freeman, one of many real-life vets in the cast). Meanwhile, her gruff role-model grandfather (Ed Harris), who fought in Vietnam, dismisses talk of PTSD. But the fact remains, more U.S. soldiers die of suicide than in combat, lending an urgency to the idea that it’s our collective responsibility to support those like Merit, who defend us at great personal cost. —PD

South Korean genre hits like “Squid Game” and “Parasite” have proven so popular in recent years that audiences no longer need convincing to check out some of the country’s most compelling new exports — though Hur Jin-ho’s tense, morally thorny drama slipped quietly under the radar this spring. Track it down, and the film’s guaranteed to grab you from the first scene, in which an inexplicably furious sports car driver smashes into an SUV. That opening act of aggression sets the stage for all kinds of heightened emotions, inadvertently pitting two brothers against one another: One’s an attorney who’s been hired to represent the driver, while the other is a doctor fighting to save the injured girl who narrowly survived the accident. But that’s just the beginning of the movie’s many ethical dilemmas, as the siblings’ teenage children have committed an inexplicable crime that makes this anything-but-normal family every bit as compelling as the characters in Netflix’s “Adolescence” (which is cinematic enough to merit an honorable mention on this mid-year list). —PD

It’s a throat-ripping vampire movie. And a simmering, layered portrait of a small-town Mississippi Delta community in 1932. And the story of underworld twins, Smoke and Stack (embodied with unnerving nuance by Michael B. Jordan), who return to the Deep South to open a juke joint because they want to make a killing, and they want to do it with a new kind of freedom. And it’s a pop vision of the blues, and of why that primal music would lure the vampires like moths to a bonfire, because they want to own that music, and suck it inside themselves, and destroy it, all at the same time. If it sounds like there’s a lot going in Ryan Coogler’s Robert Johnson-meets-Irish-Dracula underworld social horror tragedy, there is — at moments, maybe a bit too much. Yet it’s exhilarating to take a ride in a popcorn fantasy this heady, where the forces of evil add up to an oppressive destiny. Coogler has vowed that there will be no sequel, but the Marvel-style post-credits teaser leaves you wanting and imagining one. —OG

Five months ago, when Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s dazzling and definitive documentary premiered at Sundance, its very title was an acknowledgment of a daunting reality — that Sly Stone, even before he died, seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. And it wasn’t just that he’d disappeared as a presence. It was the grandeur of his achievement — and influence — that had somehow been waylaid. Stone’s death, on June 9, has brought forth a reckoning about who he was and everything he invented. But Questlove was already there, digging into the radical inclusivity of Sly and the Family Stone, the creative mystery of how much of our funk-pop-soul DNA was forged by Sly, and profiling what may be the most weirdly forgotten thing about him: what a cool, majestic, towering, boundary-breaking erotic-god rock star he was, an artist who could rule anywhere from Woodstock to “Ed Sullivan,” who promised to take you higher and did, but who wrestled with demons at once personal and cultural. “Sly Lives!” is the music documentary as exhilarating excavation. —OG

By now, A24 fans have probably figured out that the beloved indie studio makes two kinds of films: disruptive WTF shockers, like “Spring Breakers” and “Hereditary” (what I call “bizart-house movies”), and sensitive contemporary dramas, à la “Past Lives” and “Moonlight” (whose director, Barry Jenkins, serves as a producer on Eva Victor’s Sundance-launched debut). “Sorry, Baby” contains no sick, psychotronic twists, belonging instead to the quieter second category. Writer-director Victor (whom you may recognize from “Billions”) also stars, playing a promising young grad student named Agnes whose academic career is all but derailed when her thesis adviser crosses the line. The incident occurs off-camera but redefines how Agnes perceives the world — from the judgmental classmate who sees no big deal in sleeping with her professor to the supportive best friend (Naomi Ackie) who offers unconditional understanding. Some have faulted Victor’s generation with focusing too heavily on their own trauma, but the film is more nuanced than that, charting how others (including Lucas Hedges and John Carroll Lynch) gradually help Agnes to trust again. —PD

The word “zombie” is said only once in Danny Boyle’s visceral, quarantine-set sequel, and even then, it’s by someone from the outside world (the Swedish solider Erik) who has presumably been exposed to “The Walking Dead” and all those Romero knockoffs that exploded in the wake of “28 Days Later.” The genre-energizing 2002 thriller not only accelerated the lumbering “living dead” phenomenon, but recentered our underlying fear of zombies not on monsters munching our brains but the threat of bloodborne contagion — which is why this franchise refers to them as “the infected.” But where are Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland supposed to take a sequel, now that we’ve collectively survived a real-world pandemic? Their brilliant solution: make an allegory for how our species deals with such a society-disrupting emergency, showing us the world through the eyes of children too young to remember the Before Times. Smarter still, they provide a profound set-piece (the Bone Temple) in which the audience can join the characters in reflecting upon those we lost to the plague. —PD