My dear and loyal readers,

I’m afraid this, in many ways, was not a particularly great year for movies. While some massive successes buoyed spirits a bit in the spring, summer, and fall, there were far more high-profile films that were creatively and commercially disappointing. Auteurs I’ve loved in the past rolled out work that was middling, indulgent, dull. Great actors got swallowed up in films that had no idea what they were trying to say. Less great actors crashed and burned in their attempts to ascend to a new plane of renown. The summer blockbusters were largely forgettable, the indie darlings under-seen. But! There were still plenty of films that worked in one way or another, that thrilled or inspired or made me laugh throughout these punishing 12 months. Not all of those movies are reflected on this list, but those mentioned below were the top highlights as I saw it when I sat down to write. 

Note: The two asterisked movies are marked because while they did receive tiny awards-qualifying runs in the US this year, they might more properly be regarded as 2026 releases. 

If 28 Days Later was about all of media-maddened modern society, 28 Years Later is more specifically focused on the UK, isolated post-Brexit and rooting around in the mud to find an ancient idea of itself. Or, at least, that is one read—of which some British acquaintances have gently tried to disabuse me. But I dunno; I still see it. Whatever Danny Boyle’s weird and eerie movie is trying to say, I love its atavistic jitter, its curious mix of beauty and dread. Sure the Jimmy Savile-styled band of merry men that pops up at the end is a little wonky, and I desperately wished for more of Jodie Comer, but otherwise I was totally captivated and rattled by this strange and melancholy vision. Maybe it’s a sign of our times, or something, that a bizarre scene in which a teenage boy is handed the freshly washed skull of his recently dead mother is more moving than it is horrifying. Whatever poignancy we can find these days, I guess.

This one is definitely about Brexit. How else to interpret the fact that Bridget now feels so unmoored and alone without her husband (who represents mainland Europe)? Or, possibly, Michael Morris’s film is just a winsome, bittersweet story of finding love after loss. The best franchise entry since the first one, Mad About the Boy finds Renée Zellweger in peak form, ably kept company by the ever charming Chiwetel Ejiofor and, great googly moogly, Leo Woodall. Politely speaking, amid all the talk of Harris and Paul and Josh and Callum and whatever other willowy British Isles dreamboats are currently sailing through the world’s sex dreams, Woodall has gone way undersung. He was so heartbreakingly good (and hot) in One Day and he does it again (being good, and hot) in Bridget Jones. Stay tuned for next year’s Tuner, in which Woodall plays a sad-eyed pianist-turned-safe cracker and does it all with the darlingest trace of a Brooklyn accent—it’s both good and hot. 

Yes, the centerpiece fight scene in Michael Angelo Covino’s rambling comedy is a riotous joy. But I lost it even harder at the sight of Kyle Marvin trying to hold onto a bunch of goldfish (the animals, not the crackers) in plastic bags as he does loop-de-loops on a rollercoaster. It’s absurdly funny and oddly sweet. As the film pokes fun at contemporary mores about open relationships and infidelity, Splitsville never wanders too far from its core mission: making its audience laugh. While we all complain (fairly!) that Hollywood doesn’t make comedies anymore, here at least was this indie gem, as unafraid to be as stupid as it is, quite often, smart. 

My go-to line about this movie all fall has been, if Ethan Hawke did this performance on Broadway they would hand him the Tony at curtain call—no need to wait until June. But, instead he does some of his best work to date in Richard Linklater’s amiably lo-fi, self-contained film, a discursive journey through the pains, pleasures, and peccadillos of Lorenz Hart, a musical-theater genius whose legacy was eclipsed by the man who replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner. (That guy was Oscar Hammerstein, certainly worthy of his own mighty legacy.) Hawke’s Hart is swishy and sad and erudite, a doomed artist pickling his brain to fight the pain. It’s a deeply humane and thoughtful performance, a fair and honest tribute to a man grasping for immortality. 

A vivid picture of Taiwanese immigrants living in New York City’s Chinatowns, Constance Tsang’s debut feature is a shattering but also hopeful look at people trying to find themselves, and each other, in America. Haipeng Xu and Wu Ke-xi lovingly play two best friends who are both employed at a massage parlor, working to ease the days of their customers while they reach for peace and contentment in their own lives. A tragic thing happens in Blue Sun Palace, but Tsang does not turn her film into yet another plodding, sodden meditation on grief. That emotion is certainly in there, but there is specificity and purpose to it. This movie was not on my radar at all until someone urged me to watch it recently, so now I am doing the same with you. It’s well worth your time. 

In a million other dimensions, this cute little movie, from Nicholas Colia, would be cloying and clichéd, a Kurt Hummel figurine full of bad caricature. But our universe’s Griffin in Summer is an observant, measured delight about a theater-obsessed gay teenager, anchored by Everett Blunck’s utterly winning lead performance. Colia tells his story nimbly and delicately, as Griffin develops his first awoooga crush on an older guy, an arty slacker played by the increasingly indispensable Owen Teague. The film does not concern itself with any May-July taboo, mind you. It’s instead mostly about what it is to be young and queer, newly aware that—poor you, lucky you—a world of swoon and heartbreak awaits you whenever you decide to jump in the pool. 

This movie, on the other hand, does venture toward the fringes of sexuality. Not too far, mind you, but certainly further than a lot of gay romances tend to. But much like Griffin in Summer, Harry Lighton’s film presents a disarmingly kind picture of discovery and romantic adventure, pitching Harry Melling’s lovelorn shy guy into the orbit of Alexander Skarsgård’s biker daddy dom. Stylish and clever, Pillion titillates with a few graphic bits. But it is mostly a shrewd rendering of the evolving dynamic between two men trying to figure out how they might fit together. It’s a study of learned chemistry and its limits, of fumbling through the world of sex and dating and finding one’s ideal place in all that thrilling, daunting possibility. 

The happiest marriage in movies this year was the one between Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender’s cool spies in Steven Soderbergh’s best genre exercise since Side Effects. A cat and mouse game in which the mouse is actually a cat too, Black Bag is yet another shining example of what Soderbergh can do with a modest budget, some great actors wanting to have some fun, and a laidback philosophy on what movies ought to be. Many of us had high hopes that Black Bag would be the rare movie in 2025 that captured a grownup audience looking to have an enjoyable evening outside the house. But of course the nation rejected it, as it has most good things in this sorry year. Oh well. At least it exists!

Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s shattering documentary journeys deep into the fetid heart of Alabama’s prison system, where the incarcerated—who are disproportionately Black—are kept for years or entire lifetimes as, essentially, slaves. It’s an appalling exposé, one that uses a localized injustice to speak to the far broader harms of the prison state and the rot of the American justice system. That The Alabama Solution is difficult to watch is entirely the point; this brutal practice survives partly because its evils are kept hidden away from everyday life. Though, even when confronted with these horrific realities, plenty of Alabamians and their countrymen don’t seem to care one bit. 

The final part of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex, Dreams, Love film trilogy, Love is a tender, wistful, quietly metaphysical look at lives blown toward one another by whispery Oslo breezes. Two men meet on a passenger ferry and strike up a gentle romance, colored by illness and the dull ache of history. Elsewhere, a man and a woman enter into a relationship that is complicated by diverging ideas about what couplehood really means. Around them the city breathes and sighs in Haugerud’s generous snapshot of people and place. Love is the movie equivalent of wind rustling through leaves. It’s hushed and meditative and yet piercingly alert to the ambient hum of life.

Composed entirely of police bodycam footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s film is a dreadful march toward a terrible outcome. The basic story is that a woman in a Florida suburb terrorized her neighbors and their children until one of them was dead. This awful incident’s implications are vast, touching on Stand Your Ground laws, the role of the police as community peacekeepers, and the quotidian racism that touches every corner of the country. The Perfect Neighbor is meticulously stitched together, a wonder of careful editing that, yes, turns a real-life tragedy into something like a somber thriller, but never prioritizes nifty storytelling over its heavy message.