The Best Movies of 2025, According to W Editors

In a year defined by system collapse and reinvention, the best films refused to play it safe. From the intimacy of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, to the spectacle of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, to the idiosyncratic world-building of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and the quiet ache of Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, the best filmmakers took risks and leaned into bold visions. Even studio fare like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another felt energized for a new era.

Below, in no particular order, find the films that W editors loved most this year:

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Family dynamics are anything but straightforward, and no one illuminated that better this year than Joachim Trier. The Danish auteur enlisted a stacked cast composed of Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas for a restrained tale about a family (and an actor) who just can’t see eye to eye. It’s a true ensemble cast in every sense: a director father estranged from his actor daughters, and an American actor (Fanning) who unexpectedly becomes the face of his new film. A scene between sisters Nora and Agnes—Reinsve and Lilleaas’s characters—actually got a tear out of me. —Matthew Velasco, Staff Writer

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

You’d be hard-pressed to name a better duo than Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos. After the smash success of 2023’s Poor Things, the actor and director re-teamed this year for Bugonia. Recalling Lanthimos’s early work and inspired by the 2003 film Save the Green Planet!, it’s a kooky tale about a pharmaceutical CEO/Girl Boss (Stone) who is kidnapped by two conspiracy theorists convinced she’s an alien set on destroying the human race. Stone went all out for the role, including fully shaving her head and dousing herself in antihistamine. It’s not for everyone, but, boy, was it fun. —MV

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

The actor and director Zach Cregger worked on two films in 2025: Companion, a sci-fi thriller that he produced; and Weapons, his directorial follow-up to 2022's Barbarian, which turned him into something of a name in the horror scene. Weapons proves that Cregger isn't going anywhere, and in fact has cemented himself as a master storyteller. Starring the always-brilliant Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Amy Madigan, the story centers on an average American suburb that gets turned upside down when, in the middle of the night, several children flee from their homes and don’t come back. All the kids are from the same classroom, and only one pupil stays inside his house. The spine-chilling premise is certainly intriguing, but it's the way the narrative unfolds that's really satisfying. Each mysterious event in the town is told from a different character's perspective, slowly lifting the veil on a thrilling and terrifying tale. —Maxine Wally, Senior Digital Editor

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Sinners had two of the most electrifying scenes of the year, both centered on music: first, the much-discussed one-shot take connecting the history of Black music throughout the ages, culminating in Miles Caton’s stunning vocals literally burning the house down, and second (and of great personal interest to me), a raucous step dance to classic Irish folk song “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” led by the living dead, no less. All this in a Gothic vampire thriller starring Michael B. Jordan as twins, with the sublime Wunmi Mosaku anchoring the whole thing. —Claire Valentine McCartney, Culture Editor

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

One of the year’s few capital “M” movies. Like any great Safdie film, Marty Supreme doesn’t let up for a second, giving the whole thing the feeling of a whiplash ping pong match, much like its central theme. The film, in theaters on Christmas Day, ultimately lives up to Timothée Chalamet’s hype beast press tour. —CV

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

The bare bones of this plot are basically Paul Thomas Anderson’s proposition for what the Star Wars sequels should have been, while the meat is essentially a series of Looney Tunes-esque chase sequences with Leonardo DiCaprio as a stoned, depressed Bugs Bunny (spot the Foghorn Leghorn cameo in act II). Teyana Taylor gives a career-defining performance, and the supporting cast is a pop culture delight with rapper Junglepussy, longtime Saturday Night Live writer Jim Downey, and Starletta DuPois all delivering standout moments. It’s also a thrilling dissection of our current political moment, with Sean Penn playing perhaps what may go down as cinema’s definitive tragic villain of our Trumpian (or RFK JR.-ian) times. Taking America’s most impressive contribution to the history of world culture (pure Hollywood entertainment) and twisting it around into an unshakable meditation on what we’ve allowed our wider culture to become? Brilliant. —Kyle Munzenrieder, Senior News Editor

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)

This is a very different David Cronenberg. Quite refreshing to see himself redefining his work through the topic of grief. Fetishistic, twisted, and very dark. —Tobias Holzmann, Design Director

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

This film is a rollercoaster ride from start to finish. Benicio del Toro is a flawed, yet endearing hero, Michael Cera, a sneakily hilarious foil, and Mia Threapleton, a comically dry, impassive, nun-to-be whose performance elicited a whole-hearted brava from me as I left the theater. And don’t forget Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston's comical two-on-two basketball competition. At first glance, the film is an adventure full of twists and hijinks, but I really felt it was a beautifully dressed (in Wes Anderson style, of course), round-about reconciliation between a father and his estranged daughter, evoking all the feels by the film’s end. —Abrigail Williams, Associate Social Media Manager

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho)

In this sci-fi black comedy, Parasite director Bong Joon Ho casts Robert Pattinson as clone Mickey 17—the seventeenth iteration of a man desperate enough to become an expendable explorer helping humankind expand onto another planet. The kicker? Two of Pattinson’s clones accidentally co-exist, which is explicitly forbidden. With a dual performance on Pattinson’s part, tongue-in-cheek performances by Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette, poignant lessons taught by sentient aliens, and Naomi Ackie becoming an all-out favorite for me, this oddball film should be on your watchlist. —AW

Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)

There was a scene in Sirāt, Oliver Laxe’s unconventional thriller, so nerve-wracking and surprising that just about everyone in the New York Film Festival screening I attended let out a yell—or at least a gasp. The movie is set in the Moroccan desert, where roving European ravers drive from party to party in camper vans as some sort of political doomsday looms in the background. A middle-aged dad brings his young son to a middle-of-nowhere techno party to search for his teenage daughter, who has been missing for months. A group of punkish ravers leads them to the next party across the desert, and a string of unpredictable disasters and horrors unfolds. The movie is bizarre and unsettling, an increasingly rare and welcome combination for a movie! —Jensen Davis, Features Editor

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)

Sorry, Baby was the movie of my year because it made me feel hope and hopelessness at the same time, left me grateful to be a woman, and pushed me to ponder life in ways I hadn’t before. The film’s emotional honesty felt deeply personal, capturing devastation alongside moments of dark, surprising humor that have lingered with me for months. Eva Victor’s film doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does offer understanding, and for me, that made all the difference. —Che Baez, Visuals Editor