The Best Movies of 2025 So Far

Steven Soderbergh’s take on love, marriage and espionage plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as written by John le Carré, as fellow spies/spouses Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett navigate a precarious situation involving a double agent in their organization. He’s been tasked with finding out who might behind the sale of classified information; she’s the prime suspect. From there, it gets complicated. Yet the sheer fun that the filmmaker, his leads and their co-stars — Pierce Brosnan, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Industry‘s Marisa Abel — are having as they both indulge in an old-school spy-vs.-spy thriller and use it as a metaphor for faith, trust and power struggles in relationships is contagious. You want movie-star glamour and a smart deconstruction of a genre? It’s all in the bag.

Sifting through old footage during the pandemic, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, Still Life) came up with the idea of using outtakes and scenes from his previous films — all of which featured his longtime actors Tao Zhao and Zhubin Li — to craft something new. For a while, you ride shotgun through a stream-of-conscious tour through the nation’s cities and rural provinces, complete with corporate-sponsored pageantry and personal strife. It’s only when you get to the final third of the movie that Jia drops the hammer, and you suddenly realize that what felt like a free-form slideshow of China’s prosperity in the early 21st century has been carefully crafted to break your heart.

When the United Kingdom went into yet another Covid-fueled lockdown in early 2021, actor Sam Crane found himself in the middle of an existential crisis. He also spent a lot of time playing Grand Theft Auto Online, which eventually led to a brilliant idea: Why not stage his own theatrical production within the virtual world of the multiplayer game, casting his fellow GTA fanatics as costars? And what better work to tackle that Shakespeare’s classic drama about the most melancholy of Danes? Shot entirely via in-world gameplay, this funny, ingenious and surprisingly touching documentary about art as a communal salve proves that you’ve never truly experienced the Bard’s genius unless you’ve performed his words while taking arms with a rocket launcher against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.

Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to 2017’s I Am Not a Witch starts with a woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) coming across a dead body in the road. The fact that she’s dressed exactly like Missy Elliott from “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” video, down to the silver helmet and puffy black jumpsuit, shows you that Nyoni has a wicked sense of humor; the revelation that the corpse is “Uncle Fred,” a well-known pedophile who chronically abused the village’s young women for years without consequences, demonstrates that the movie is also not fucking around. A pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to call out complicity and speak out regardless of such stigmas.

Because every new generation deserves a Friday to call its own — and former music video director Lawrence Lamont’s buddy comedy about two young women on a quest to make rent or die tryin’ in L.A.’s Baldwin Hills neighborhood replicates the formula of Ice Cube’s cult classic to a tee. The secret sauce here, however, is the chemistry between Keke Palmer and Solána Imani Rowe, a.k.a. SZA, who play off each other like a seasoned comic duo; no matter how many obstacles get thrown their way (deadbeat boyfriends, angry gangsters, angrier romantic rivals, passive-aggressive loan officers, biscuit-stealing bandits), these two have each others’ backs. Given the movie was dumped in the no-man’s-land known as “January releases,” there was little reason to expect much out of this new spin on an old formula. But it’s sharp when it needs to be, as broad as it wants to be, knows exactly what it is — and gives its stars a superior showcase for their skills.

Just when you thought John Lennon’s life and career had been picked clean in terms of documentary fodder, along comes Kevin Macdonald’s insightful, penetrating look at Lennon and Yoko Ono’s first few years as New Yorkers. Though it uses the 1972 “One to One” benefit at Madison Square Garden (the only complete solo concert Lennon would do prior to his death) as a sun around which to orbit, this extraordinary collection of home movies, interviews, and news footage paints a picture of two ex-pats who found political radicalization, a sense of personal reclamation and place to finally call home. The One Day in September filmmaker’s access to the archives clearly unearths a lot of treasures — the phone calls involving Ono attempting to procure flies for an exhibit is worth the price of admission on its own — yet what makes this look back stand out is the way it presents both of them in the process of individual and mutual evolutions. How do you navigate life as the most famous (and infamous) couple in the world? You test all of your assumptions, fuck up once or twice, and never stop growing as human beings.

Wes Anderson scores big with this combo of corporate-espionage thriller, slapstick comedy, and father-daughter family drama, centered around Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda (Benicio Del Toro), international business-magnate of mystery. He’s trying to make sure his dream project involving a multinational transport system becomes a reality before he’s assassinated by rivals; if he can also mend fences with his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton), who wants nothing to do with her dad and yearns to become a nun, that’s simply a bonus. It’s got all the usual hallmarks of an Anderson project, from an all-star ensemble cast to the meticulously composed imagery that’s made him a film-nerd idol. But this new film gels in a genuinely satisfying way that several of his recent works haven’t. And it gifts us with a real discovery in Threapleton, whose deadpan reactions, comic timing and chemistry with Del Toro make this feel like there’s a heart beating underneath it all.

In which Ryan Coogler and longtime collaborator/muse/21st century movie star Michael B. Jordan go HAM on the vampire movie and somehow manage to fold in an old-fashioned 1930s gangster movie, an ode to the blues and a meta-history lesson about two separate but highly unequal Americas as well. Southern twins Smoke and Stack — both played by Jordan, in such a distinct manner that makes you forget you’re watching the same actor twice over — return home after a stint up north, with grand plans of opening up their own juke joint outside of town. The good news is it’s an instant hit with the community. The bad news is it’s also attracted an alpha bloodsucker (Jack O’Connell) who’d graciously like to come inside and feast on the occupants, please and thank you. Digs at cultural appropriation and the double standards regarding race and capitalism sit side by side with gory action sequences and ambitious set pieces — and that’s before Coogler takes a big swing on a showstopper that literally unites centuries of Black music under one roof.

From the “A Star Is Born” Dept.: Writer-director-actor Eva Victor instantly establishes herself as a multi-hyphenate to be reckoned with this semi-fractured, sometimes harrowing and often hilarious tale of a college professor dealing with a longstanding trauma. It would have been enough for Victor to translate an already pointed comic voice, honed through improv shows and viral tweets, to the screen. Yet her debut knows when to go for deadpan laughs and when to knock you flat with emotional haymakers; occasionally, as in a visit to a doctor whose bedside manner leaves something to be desired, the movie delivers both at once. The temptation is to compare Victor to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, especially since the movie gives off heavy Fleabag vibes (minus the fourth-wall breaking). But while they may be kindred spirits, this Brooklyn-by-way-of-San-Francisco artist is mining a wit and pathos that’s all her own. Throw in solid supporting performances from Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges and Louis Cancelmi, and you have a keeper here.

Trust Canada’s absurdist auteur Matthew Rankin (The Twentieth Century) to give us a vintage Iranian kid-centric drama, complete with subtitled Farsi dialogue and a visual vocabulary akin to 1970s Abbas Kiarostami-lite …and set the whole thing in the snowy, super-banal suburbs of his hometown Winnipeg. It initially feels like hipster film-nerd trolling, right down to the replica of the Tehran-based Kanoon institute’s logo (with a turkey instead of the organization’s signature songbird). But the longer you watch Rankin’s deadpan juxtaposition of styles, you more you begin to realize it’s not a goof so much as a mash note. There is no universal language except the lingua franca of seeing yourself reflected back in cinema made half a world away, and then responding in kind.

A movie about a single siege in Ramadi, Iraq, on a single day in 2006 — one given a stunning sense of verisimilitude by filmmaker/real-life participant Ray Mendoza, and a hyperventilating sense of dread by his co-director/longtime apocalypse-channeler Alex Garland — this extraordinary portrait of a platoon of SEALs caught in a military firefight works double-time to recreate what it’s like to be in “the shit.” You get the sheer tedium before the storm, the tsunami of chaos and noise once things go down, and the way that survival instincts honed by training automatically kicks in for these soldiers (played by a who’s who of young Hollywood: Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis). War is hell, the film reminds you, while also being kind enough to hold the door for viewers as it ushers them into the scalding heat.

Once upon a time, Blake (Arieh Worthalter) and Albert (Paul Ahmarani) were an inseparable filmmaking duo. Then the former decided to become a full-time documentarian, the latter took a gig writing for TV, and their friendship took a hit. But surely, a weekend away at Blake’s hunting cabin in the woods, with Albert’s family and some old acquaintances in tow, will fix years of petty resentments and professional jealousies, right? Quebecois writer-director Philippe Lesage elegantly sets up a minefield for his two middle-aged artists to skip across and stumble through, then adds in a younger filmmaker (Noah Parker), who both worships Blake and has the hots for Albert’s daughter (Aurélia Arandi-Longpré), into the mix. The result is a stunning indictment of fragile male egos and the legacy of macho archetypes that’s part psychological chamber piece, part Brothers Grimm fairy tale and the sort of cringe-inducing drama you watch through your fingers. All this, plus it features the most enthusiastically choreographed dance party ever set to the B-52’s “Rock Lobster.” Seek this one out by any means necessary.