2025 was a disastrous year for Hollywood and the “resistance libs” who spent ten years trying to defeat and destroy Donald Trump, only to see him back in power, not just winning the Electoral College this time, but winning the popular vote. The disconnect between politicians who can’t understand how that happened and a Hollywood that can’t understand why the public turned away is a story none of them will ever tell. They won’t tell it because they know what would happen to them if they did. That’s the dirty little secret: the fascists are the side that demands conformity, punishes dissent, and destroys the careers of people like me just for speaking out against them.
By some miracle, like the tiny green plant in Wall-E, some films have managed to create life in the suffocating, oppressive bubble Hollywood has become. It gives me some hope that perhaps there will be more courage and artistic daring in the future. But if the audience is always going to be a small hive of bloggers and critics, well then that is the end of that.
We better hope things get better because they can’t get any worse.
So let’s do this. Ten films of the year that I thought were very good, even great.
- Sinners. Ryan Coogler’s epic about the origins of the blues, specifically Robert Johnson, who “met The Devil at the Crossroads” and traded his soul for greatness. The way Coogler tells this story is so interesting and unpredictable. It isn’t a binary of “those people over there are bad,” because in the Christian faith, we are all sinners. Instead, it tells the story of how oppression ultimately produced great music that seemed to come from a different place, one that isn’t about religion at all. Coogler is saying it didn’t come from God but from history.
Sinners is about so many things and effortlessly blends many different genres in one. It’s sexy, it’s thrilling, it’s funny, it’s unpredictable. That it’s not the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Picture tells you all you need to know about this industry today and the last ten years of unending virtue signaling that puts the industry right back where it started. If you can’t even award a film like Sinners Picture and Director (not just the designated screenplay slot), then what are you even doing with your mandates and your rules?Sinners did more than just put butts in seats. It became that rare movie that almost everyone has seen and most loved. That is the kind of movie that should win Best Picture. But it won’t.
One Battle After Another is everything Sinners is not. It’s entertaining, with good performances, but it’s weighed down by THE MESSAGE. Granted, it reflects well on the white community because they see themselves in Leonardo DiCaprio, the one nice white guy doing his best in a world where he is no longer important. The Oscars have always been a reflecting pool for narcissists, not a measure of worth. One Battle will stand the test of time because of the cult of PTA. But Sinners will stand the test of time because it’s a great movie.
- Hamnet – Chloé Zhao also stepped out of the box of “woman of color makes good” with Hamnet. She made something so unequivocal that even the film bros feel okay about criticizing her. But no one is talking about her. They’re talking about the movie because of how it impacts audiences. Has there been a more moving scene in any movie this year than the end of Hamnet? The first time I saw it, I stood up in my living room and gave Zhao a standing ovation, along with Jessie Buckley, the great Paul Mescal, and the other actors in the film. It is pure art. One of the most beautiful films ever made and one that does what movies and art can sometimes do: gift us with catharsis.Hamnet is not so much about Shakespeare as about the power of art, why we need it not just for the royals and the upper class but mostly for those with nothing who happen to wander in. That is why it was invented in the first place when we drew on cave walls. We needed the language to explain what we could see. Zhao mostly stripped Hamnet of its specifics and instead chose to tell a more impressionistic story. My Gen-Z daughter only really loved two movies this year, and at the top of the list was Hamnet.
- Frankenstein – Guillermo Del Toro also made the best film of his career with Frankenstein, his magnum opus and his childhood dream. It might seem like the same story we’ve seen many times, but it isn’t, thanks to Jacob Elordi’s performance, which humanizes the creature, making it a much deeper, richer tragedy of mankind. It isn’t so much a lesson about pitchfork mobs as it is about compassion and the complex nature of human beings. Beautiful in every respect, breathtaking in its scope, Frankenstein turns out to be among the few films this year that did have the ability to invite everyone in. It didn’t take a side nor did it push THE MESSAGE. It just told a story and that is why all of us need art.
- Ari Aster’s Eddington will stand the test of time because it is among the few films — maybe the only film — that attempts to tell the objective truth about 2020, the year that broke America. That he even flirts with criticizing the Left and not only demonizing the Right has made it not that popular on Blue Sky, the hub for the strident puritans. And it certainly won’t be nominated for any Oscars, though it deserves to be. In an alternative timeline, it would be, but “we just don’t live in that kind of world, Thelma.” In Eddington, it’s performative activism and cell phones that serve as the weapons of war, as we manifest imaginary dramas fed to us by manipulative algorithms. A western but cell phones and the internet are the guns? What a great idea. There was a time when a movie like this would have been nominated. That would be the 1970s, as Eddington will hold its place like Network has. But since it makes fun of the powerful and the devout, well, they can’t and won’t vote for it.
- Bugonia – like Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, Guillermo Del Toro, and Ari Aster, Yorgos Lanthimos also made his best film with Bugonia, a movie that most in the hive mind aren’t quite ready for. They can dive in the first layer — mankind is not worth saving because we destroy our own habitat. But they can’t go any deeper than that without feeling the discomfort of self-examination. Emma Stone is brilliant in the film, as are Jesse Plemons and the great Aidan Delbis, who would become the first autistic nominee should he land in Supporting. The idea that humanity should be wiped out because of the Jesse Plemons character is kind of funny. But it’s the intolerance of we flawed creatures that is the perfect indictment of today’s Left amid the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening.
- Sentimental Value – The first thing I noticed about Sentimental Value was that it was a film that dares just to tell a story about people. That’s common in films not made in America, of course, but still, from the first scene on through to have a movie just be about three people navigating their complicated relationships felt very 1990s to me and thus, had sentimental value for me. It’s harder for it to shine amid movies that reflect the phantasmagoria of the industry because they’re about fascism or dictators, but on a pure filmmaking level – acting, writing, directing – you can’t get much better than this.
- Marty Supreme – Josh Safdie may have made his best film with Marty Supreme. It’s just that I hated his other movies, so it’s hard for me to render a fair judgment. The moment I fell in love with this movie was the scene with the great Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park after she gifts him with an expensive necklace, they have sex and are caught by police. The necklace is then given to the cops to buy them off, leaving poor Marty once again without funds. So he has to somehow try to get another necklace from the crying woman.
It’s irritating and depressing watching so many young women on TikTok run this through the deflavorizing machine of social justice by calling Marty a “misogynist” or saying the film is about “toxic masculinity.” I’ve even seen some film bros who like the softer, feminized Leo in One Battle saying that Marty is like The Wolf of Wall Street: a film about a “bad guy.” Really? That’s what you took from it? To me, he’s unformed – a post-WW2 Jew trying to find his place in the land of opportunity. He doesn’t get it until the end that life comes at you fast or, as John Lennon would say, while you’re busy making other plans.
- Jay Kelly – by all accounts, I should have hated Jay Kelly. George Clooney’s self-importance and inserting himself into politics is annoying. I’ve never been a fan of Noah Baumbach. But somehow the movie won me over. It is, as all of the other films on this list, the director’s best film. It hasn’t captured the zeitgeist, and there’s a chance it won’t even be nominated for Best Picture, nor Clooney, who gives his best performance to date, nominated for Best Actor. Adam Sandler is brilliant and should still be among the strongest contenders for Supporting Actor.
Was a time, before Hollywood transformed itself into a totalitarian hellhole, that Netflix would have splashed blurbs on this film all over its advertising, invited me to its parties, and allowed me to share the same room with the special people. And here I am praising the movie anyway. I was never in it for that kind of thing. Jay Kelly is the one film that anyone could watch and get caught up in the story. I mean, not the film bros. It’s not a movie for them. Every year, it’s harder and harder to recommend films when people ask me what’s good. There are so few movies that anyone can watch, and this is one of them.
- Train Dreams – I really didn’t want to put three Netflix movies on this list, but here we are. A Netflix movie is only as good as the artist’s ability to adopt self-discipline in storytelling. Most can’t. Clint Bentley manages to maintain the beautiful simplicity of the Denis Johnson novel, thereby making a loving tribute to the writing. Much of it is told in voice-over by the best narrator in the business, Will Patton, which makes it kind of a book-and-movie hybrid. It has a dreamlike quality, and you never know what is real and what the protagonist dreams of for his life. It’s another of the movies this year with killer endings and one that you can sit anyone down in front of.
- Weapons – I still think a different ending would have benefited the Story, because I didn’t understand why some of the kids remained in a trance. Young people on TikTok informed that it was because they were traumatized, which is a very Gen-Z interpretation. But it didn’t feel right to me that some did and some didn’t. Either way, it was still among the best films of the year without a doubt. Like Frankenstein and Sinners, it uses the horror genre to convey deeper ideas. Here, I see Weapons as a metaphor for cancel culture, where certain people use others as weapons to attack, and they just do as ordered without thinking it through or having the strength to stand up to it. I’m not sure if that was the intent or not. I guess we see what we want to see. But there’s no doubt that Weapons stood out among the offerings this year.
I could do a whole different list on the films made in other countries. I’ve only included Sentimental Value, but No Other Choice, It Was Just an Accident, and nearly every film on the short list would qualify. But I’m still hoping that the American film industry can break free of what oppresses it and find a way to be as good as the best filmmakers in other countries.
I feel great despair about the movie industry right now because I see a mob of angry scolds who hold freedom of thought and speech like the beast in Poltergeist. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to great movies again until artists are free to speak freely. And honestly, with AI on the march, we might never have to. AI can be the conformist robot artists are expected to be now. So why wouldn’t it take over Hollywood? The best way to fight it is to allow people to dissent, to vote differently, to criticize, to speak freely. Until that happens, however, Hollywood and the Oscars will exist inside their self-protective bubble, shutting out the rest of us as they make their escape to the paradise of streaming.
Happy New Year for anyone still around and reading this site. I still don’t know how long it will exist. I guess we’ll see what the next year holds.
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