The Academy will have give its awards, but here are Matthew Turner’s choices for the best of 2025

By Matthew Turner
(All images courtesy IMDB)

While Hollywood is giving out the Oscars tonight, here are my top 10 films of 2025 (in no particular order). What will the Academy have gotten right, and what will have been snubbed?

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28 Years Later

Danny Boyle’s long-awaited continuation of his iconic reinvention of the zombie horror genre 28 Days Later shows his chameleonic qualities as a filmmaker better than the last 15 years of his career, while building excitement for what he has next in his bag of tricks.

Consciously ignoring Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, Boyle sets 28 Years Later within the same universe while building up new characters rather than relying on nostalgia. The film follows Spike, a tween played to perfection by newcomer Alfie Williams, as he copes with his confusing stage of adolescence, his mother’s illness rendering her perpetually lost and scared, and the zombies that live outside of the limits of his home outside of Great Britain.

Where 28 Years Later surpasses modern horror films that the original film inspired however, is in its large heart. I am a very open crier, but I never expected in a million years for the return of Boyle’s zombie franchise to be the biggest tear-jerker of 2025. I was not tearing up, I was sobbing buckets.

The film earns this response through strong storytelling, fascinating original characters and a simple yet relatable premise. If you have not seen 28 Years Later, or the 2026 follow-up 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, drop what you are doing to screen a double feature with one of the year’s biggest technical Academy Awards snubs.

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Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos is back! After following up his ambitious Oscar winner Poor Things with 2024’s exhaustingly bleak Kinds of Kindness, hesitance towards his next film was felt by all fans of the wicked eccentric. Especially when this next film, Bugonia, was announced to be an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean cult-classic Save the Green Planet.

What came through in the final product is a tense, engaging, masterfully plotted sci-fi comedy featuring what is, in my humble opinion, THE performance of 2025 by Jesse Plemons.

Resident Lanthimos weirdo Emma Stone gives a reliably wacky performance as Michelle Fuller, a girlboss CEO in the world of pharmaceuticals. The fake smiles, Patrick Bateman-esque beauty routine and insistence on mental health improvement for her employees by disingenuously pleading that they can go home a little early if they so choose. While Stone deserves any flowers and recognition that she is receiving for her performance in Bugonia, and honestly any other performance that she has given throughout her career, it is Plemons that makes the film work.

One of the most reliable character actors working today, Plemons hits the apex of his career as Teddy, a man weighed down by trauma, abuse and the endless quest for meaning in the universe. Along with his cousin Don, played by newcomer Aiden Delbis, Teddy decides to kidnap Michelle Fuller for interrogation purposes after researching and analyzing her mannerisms, coming to the conclusion that she may be an alien.

The film is a throbbing pressure cooker with viewers questioning whether Michelle is an alien and Teddy is vindicated for once in his pathetic life, or if Teddy is just digging his lowly existence even further. No matter the conclusion, Plemons fleshes out Teddy into a fully realized character that we cannot root against, no matter how bad he makes the situation. 

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Eddington

Starting off with a hot-take here, I do not believe that Ari Aster hit his stride until after releasing his big horror hits Hereditary and Midsommar. Despite those films working within their genre, they do not have the stranglehold over me that they have over other film fanatics of my generation.

Instead, it is Beau is Afraid and Eddington that, for myself anyway, function as living, breathing panic attacks that viewers want to crawl out of their skin while watching. Following Beau is Afraid, Joaquin Phoenix rejoins Aster to bring Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, to life.

Joining Phoenix in Aster’s largest ensemble yet are Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal and Austin Butler, who are all game to match Phoenix’s freak. Regarding Stone, I would like to paraphrase Get Out by saying that I would have given her a second Oscar nomination in 2025 if I could.

Enough about the talent on screen, how is the film itself? Eddington is a powder keg of political tensions that will undoubtedly be the defining film of the second Trump administration.

It is a satire for sure, but the film is painfully prescient and very much of the moment aging like a fine wine since its release last July. Especially for people directly affected by COVID-19, the film is an unflinching view of both the decimation of social awareness as a result of the pandemic as well as an on-the-nose portrayal of those that held their “personal freedoms” above public safety.

Subtlety is not part of Aster’s toolbox, and thank God for that.

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

The Oscar is as good as Jessie Buckley’s. Everyone is predicting it, it is an Oscar performance, and it is a great performance in a middling costume drama. In a just world, Rose Byrne will be on stage.

The word “fearless” is thrown around like cheap candy at a village parade when an actor defies the niche that they have been known for. Take Emma Stone in Poor Things, Jennifer Lawrence in mother! and Demi Moore in The Substance for recent instances. All performances that I love, but do not necessarily show an actor shedding their skin in order to show a new self.

Rose Byrne, on the other hand, shows everyone what she can do with her talent that has been taken for granted for the past decades. She can play the funny wife (Neighbors), the horror mom (Insidious) and even the comic foil (Bridesmaids and Spy).

Despite giving us so many pitch-perfect performances over the years, Byrne has never been given the starring role that she deserves. Enter If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

This film is a nightmare from beginning to end, with any conceivable issue arising for our exhausted protagonist, Linda, to astronomical effect that makes calling this film a dark comedy a stretch. The film is primarily composed of close-ups of Linda as she struggles to maintain her career, take care of the apartment while her husband is out of town and help her sick daughter who cannot eat or function properly without her.

In an utterly ingenious move by writer/director Mary Bronstein, the daughter is not seen at all. We are forced to focus on Linda and react similarly to the increasingly disturbing issues that arise, until it reaches a breaking point where the viewer wants to explode.

In turn, we want Linda to explode. The horror in the film comes from Linda’s inability to relax or breathe. The film never paints any second she needs as anything close to selfish, but the events of the film contrast this in such a painfully aware way that we need to laugh out of disbelief. 

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Marty Supreme

He may hate the ballet, but l’ll be damned if that boy can’t play some good ping-pong.

Josh Safdie’s follow-up to the legendary Uncut Gems, a film that marked the end of his professional partnership with his brother Benny Safdie, reuses the same paint as his previous works, but instead allows him to paint on a massive canvas creating his most realized project yet.

The film focuses on professional dirtbag (nothing new here for Josh) Marty Mauser. He is brought to life by everyone’s favorite theater kid Timothee Chalamet, who brings a gravity to the role that oozes a scummy charisma that you cannot look away from — a performance that brings to mind a time in cinema in which men look progressively exhausted and drained as the film goes on, a la peak Pacino and Hackman.

This is undoubtedly a pathetically meta performance that heightens the film as both Timothee and Marty struggle to fit into greatness as they see it. Marty wants to be the start of something new, an exciting sport known as ping-pong where he can be America’s champion. Chalamet desperately wants to be the new face of cinema, eager to lift cinema as the peak of modern art while not being afraid to openly beg for awards and legendary status on press tours.

Pathetic? Yes. Annoying? Absolutely. Above all else however, fascinatingly effective. To watch Mauser break any link he has to those that seek to help him, is to see Chalamet break all goodwill from more “traditional” fans of the arts.

Both of these public and “fictional” personas bring an air of unfiltered excitement, pretentiousness and arrogance that are like witnessing a car crash. We want Marty to get what is coming for him, but the freaks in us want to see him succeed. We want Chalamet to just stop talking and act, but much like his in-laws the Kardashians, we need to see what comes out of his mouth next and what his next PR nightmare will be.

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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

To preface this gush fest, I am an annoyingly invested fan of Nirvanna the Band the Show as well as every other collaboration between the Canadian gems of comedy Matt Johnson and Jay McCaroll. I have interviewed Jay, met both of them and was even directed by Matt Johnson. To erase all of this bias is truly impossible, but I will try my hardest.

The film continuation of 2007’s webseries Nirvana the Band the Show and the 2017 television series, Nirvanna the Band the Show follows the basic formula of those series’ episodic adventures while expanding the action. Matt and Jay are musicians whose sole mission in life is to perform at the Rivoli, a real music venue/restaurant located in downtown Toronto.

For any unfamiliar, this venue is home to many open mic nights and intimate performances in its backroom which caps out at a 200 person occupancy. In other words, this venue is not exactly Madison Square Garden.

Despite how easy it may look from the outside, Matt and Jay have gone almost 20 years cycling through schemes and ambitious plans that have gotten them close, but so far to blowing the minds of those that would attend their show.

Straight from the jump, 2025’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie throws both long-time fans and uninitiated viewers into a plan that has more in common with Mission Impossible than other hidden-camera comedies like Jackass. The intent is not to shock and disturb us, but rather to drop our jaws.

In my three times viewing the film, audible declarations of “what the hell” and “oh my god” flooded the theaters in between riotous laughter. As a comedy, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie exceeds with laughs aplenty. Where the film shines brightest however, is as a film about aging, friendship and the power of love. Matt and Jay have an unmatched chemistry only comparable to anyone that has been with their soulmate, platonic or romantic, for years and, as the film says beautifully, “If you’ve got a best friend, you won’t even notice getting older.”

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One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson has never missed once in his career.

Fresh out of the gate, he directed Hard Eight at the age of 25. The film oozed confidence, as well as an impressive cast including the established Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson and Phillip Baker Hall, while introducing the world to future PTA players Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly.

Since the film’s initial release, Anderson has only grown as a filmmaker, picking up new recurring collaborators, switching primary composers and even shifting from purely original screenplays to taking from the writings of Thomas Pynchon. This fascinating evolution has culminated into PTA’s first real mainstream hit of his career.

Sure, the filmbros love to wax poetic about his entire career, but 2025’s One Battle after Another latched onto the public consciousness in a way that anyone following the filmmaker for years could not have predicted. Especially when the film is a Frankensteined reconstruction of elements from Thomas Pynchon’s dense, culturally anonymous novel Vineland.

While trying some new tricks, going bigger than ever and even grabbing Leo DiCaprio, unquestionably THE actor of the past quarter-century, PTA has cracked the code on how to merge both pretentious film students and the moviegoing public.

The film is an epic about aging, revolution, the unquenchable thirst for power that brings tears of laughter and catharsis that had audiences clamoring for “a few small beers.” Undeniable in its story and execution, One Battle after Another is a modern classic that is sure to stick for the rest of cinema’s ambiguous lifespan.

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Sinners

In a rare instance, the Academy got something right: a record-breaking 16 nominations for a crowd-pleasing genre film.

Ryan Coogler’s period-horror film follows the opening of a juke joint run by identical twin criminals on the run Smoke and Stack, both played distinguishably by the always enjoyable Michael B. Jordan, which draws the attention of a sinister force. To spoil the big genre shift within the film, this sinister force is an ambitiously aged vampire by the name of Remmick, played with bloody glee by Jack O’Connell of Skins fame.

The film does not resort to becoming a 21st century clone of Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, despite the very similar basic bones, but instead Sinners spends much of the runtime establishing every character and the relationships that they hold dear in such a novelesque way that the carnage is felt. From the oppressed guitarist hopeful Sammy to Smoke’s spiritual wife Annie, every character has their moment.

Sinners works so well as an ensemble piece that I have wondered since the announcement of the Oscar nominations if the Best Casting award was created just to honor the beautiful cast of characters on display here. If the film loses this award then my statement means absolutely nothing, but your humble critic cannot imagine this award going to any other film.

Sinners is a hit in every sense of the word and one of the rare films that stands as a monumental crossover hit for audiences and critics. Despite how many, or how little, small golden men that Sinners will take home this year, the film will undoubtedly stand the test of time as one of the great blockbusters of the 21st century.

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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

I am a very simple man. If Benoit Blanc is on the case, my butt is in the seat. Since the initial Knives Out film premiered in late 2019, I have eagerly awaited each subsequent mystery in Rian Johnson’s comic mystery franchise.

Wake Up Dead Man, the third entry in the franchise, serves as the best film so far and shows no sign of creative exhaustion.

Despite Daniel Craig serving as the spotlight of the Knives Out films as the scenery chewing Benoit Blanc, Wake Up Dead Man makes the smart decision to use him as a vessel for the audience to solve an impossible crime. In fact, I would even argue that Blanc is the sidekick in this outing as he seeks to help the bright-eyed and naive priest Jud Duplenticy, played magnificently by Josh O’Connor.

All of the typical Rian Johnson jabs at modern internet culture are still here. Old man yelling at cloud writing that reads about as culturally aware as a Saturday Night Live sketch, but the humor is secondary to the humanity in this outing.

O’Connor has been a reliably charming actor since co-starring in 2024’s Challengers, even giving another incredible performance in 2025’s The Mastermind, but Duplenticy is O’Connor’s mainstream breakthrough in my eyes. He delivers every comic highlight of the film with expert timing, but balances it out with believable pathos that never makes the character feel fake or sappy.

It is unquestionably the big scene of the film, but a moment in which Duplenticy stops his investigation with Blanc in order to help a woman in need through praying with her on the phone is a flawless example of emotional storytelling. In the hands of another actor, this scene could have been phony, sickeningly sweet and/or preachy.

With O’Connor however, Jud’s faith reads as totally real to the point that you are on Blanc’s side the entire film in trying to prove his innocence. This man cannot be a murderer, right? If nothing else, Johnson’s latest entry stands as a prime example of what can be accomplished if auteurs can put their work into the world without constant studio notes or test screening meddling. For that, I am grateful.

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Weapons

Who would have thought that a PTA-inspired horror-comedy would become an Oscar favorite in the field of acting?

As a Zach Creggers fan from the days of Whitest Kids U Know, watching his growth as a filmmaker in real-time as he segued from comic outings such as The Civil War on Drugs and Miss March towards the gross, intense, yet hysterical horror films Barbarian and Weapons has been a treat to say the least.

In Creggers’ newest film, which has secured him as one of the most reliable and bankable directors in modern horror, the horror takes a backseat to the story. This is a welcome departure from 2022’s surprise hit Barbarian, a film I love but admittedly goes lighter in the plot department in service of subverting and shocking viewers with its unexpected narrative structure.

This time around, Creggers uses his carte blanche to craft a sweeping narrative that shows the effect of loss, mob mentality and police indifference on a small town that owes more to Magnolia than Barbarian.

Equipped with a larger budget for his sophomore horror outing, the film boasts a veritable who’s who of modern character actors such as Julia Garner and Josh Brolin, but anyone who has seen the film or is keeping up with the awards circuit knows that the real centerpiece of the film is Aunt Gladys. Amy Madigan’s return to box-office cinema is a triumphant, chameleonic and instantly iconic horror villain that renders the soft-spoken actress into a nasty witch who looks like she raided Richard Simmons’ dresser before feasting on the innocent. It is camp, hilarious and genuinely frightening, mostly all at the same time.

The film’s tone and effectiveness hinges on this performance, and Madigan lifted what could have been a laughable reveal into one of the most crowd-pleasing horror films of the century so far.

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Matthew Turner is a scholar of all things film and a teacher of English.