Andy Ray’s Ten Best Films of 2025

With the Covid letdown well behind us, 2025 turned out to be the third strong year in a row for the motion picture industry.  Consider that I had to leave “Is This Thing On?”, “Song Sung Blue,” “The Secret Agent,” and “Materialists” off my Top Ten List because the output was so robust.  With that said, let’s jump right in and take a look at the best of 2025:

10.  Nuremberg

Save for a surprising lack of tension during the final trial scene, James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg” hits all the right notes. Michael Shannon is strong as the lead U.S. prosecutor, but the real meat of this story is the interplay between Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe) and the U.S. Army psychiatrist brought to Germany to determine whether Goering is mentally competent to stand trial.  He’s played by Rami Malek, in the best performance of his career.  (And yes, I saw “Bohemian Rhapsody.”)  Goering believes he can beat the charges against him, and the shrink’s goal is to build up enough trust for Goering to make an unfortunate misstep at the trial.  It’s intriguing, although it probably should have been a little tighter.

9.  Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke has been one of our most consistently great actors since 2014’s “Boyhood,” consistently challenging himself by portraying a series of difficult and distraught characters. In Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” Hawke turns in perhaps the greatest performance of his career as lyricist Lorenz Hart, recently dumped by his longtime songwriting partner Richard Rodgers.  Uncomfortably attending the cast party for the opening night of Rodgers’ “Oklahoma!” (a musical Hart had no part in creating), Hawke allows us to feel the agony Hart clutches in his soul.  It’s not an easy performance to watch, and Hart’s incessant rambling grates on our nerves by the film’s conclusion.  But this is the best performance anyone gave in any film this year.

8.  Jay Kelly

In Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” George Clooney pulls off a possibly autobiographical portrait of a huge international star reflecting on his life choices. And while this picture does contain a certain element of comedy, the aching we feel as Jay contemplates the life he could have had with his two daughters is very real.  And kudos to the once too-silly-to-be-believable Adam Sandler as Jay’s manager, who feels his own family life slipping away from him due to his unfailing service to his client.  What initially feels like it could be a featherweight satire forces us to reckon with our own personal relationships.  This one creeps up on you.

7.  Eleanor the Great

If Ethan Hawke’s performance in “Blue Moon” was the year’s best, 95-year-old June Squibb turned in the second best with her spot-on interpretation of a widow who mourns the loss of her best friend by assuming the friend’s backstory as a Holocaust survivor in “Eleanor the Great.” While initially a “little white lie” intended to endear herself to a JCC class, her story soon gains local recognition when a television journalist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) picks up on it.  His daughter (played by young British actress Erin Kellyman) strikes up an intergenerational relationship with Eleanor, that proves to be the film’s most alluring.  Far from maudlin, Scarlett Johansson’s first directorial effort is an excellent and unconventional exploration of grief and loss.

6.  Hamnet

Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” is another outstanding examination of the heartbreak of grief and loss, this time couched in the true story of the death of playwright William Shakespeare’s son. Told through the lens of Shakespeare’s unique wife Agnes, Jessie Buckley turns in yet another great performance in a young career chock full of them.  This is her meatiest role since 2018’s “Wild Rose,” and it is very likely to garner her a Best Actress Oscar next month.  To say we feel Agnes’ pain is an understatement, but like “Eleanor the Great,” this one is not mawkish or overly sentimental.  The film’s apex occurs when we feel Agnes’ emotional absolution during the opening night performance of her husband’s masterpiece “Hamlet.”

5.  Highest 2 Lowest

Much as with Ethan Hawke, I can’t recall Denzel Washington ever turning in a bad performance, and he gives us one of his very best in Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest,” the story of a major music mogul responsible for the careers of many black recording artists. He faces a crisis when his son is kidnapped, then found.  Meanwhile his right-hand man’s son remains missing.  Is Washington’s character willing to foot the ransom for the return of his friend’s son, as he was his own?  Late in his career, Lee is turning in some of his best work, and tragically underseen gem explores the very thin line between society’s haves and the have-nots.

4.  One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson (the greatest director of my generation) gives us yet another winner, although it does pale in comparison to much of his previous output. Far less a character study than most of his work, “One Battle After Another” is his first attempt at an action film.  In that respect, Anderson out-Tarantinos Quentin Tarantino – whose recent product suffers from an obsession with gratuitous violence.  Here, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a political revolutionary who settles down to raise his daughter as a single parent, only to be reunited with his previous life when the daughter (Indianapolis native Chase Infiniti) is apprehended from her high school.  The final hour is edge-of-your-seat exciting, and “One Battle After Another” features two of the year’s best supporting performances – a hilarious Benicio del Toro as a touchy-feely martial arts instructor, and Sean Penn as an over-the-top white supremacist.

3.  Train Dreams

Completely different from any other film on my list, Clint Bentley’s introspective “Train Dreams” is a somber ode to the peaceful lifestyle of the mountain west of the early 20^th century. Joel Edgerton gives us the best performance of his career as a logger who spends the off-season helping lay the tracks for the railroad system.  Understated and melancholy, Will Patton narrates “Train Dreams” with a certain amount of whimsy, which offsets Edgerton’s restrained character.  As always, Felicity Jones is strong as Edgerton’s wife, who mysteriously vanishes about halfway through.  Never fully able to reconnect with life afterwards, Edgerton’s character eventually witnesses the passing of time as the railroad he helped create is made obsolete by the new highway.  The final half-hour of “Train Dreams” is probably the finest segment of filmmaking I witnessed all year.

2.  Black Bag

Proving once again that no two Steven Soderbergh films are alike, “Black Bag” (released almost a year ago) is a spellbinding, 90-minute spy thriller containing very little traditional “action” in favor of dialogue-heavy mind games and espionage with apocalyptic implications. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are at their very best as a husband and wife who become involved with the leak of a top-secret computer program.  British actress Marisa Abela heads a strong supporting cast in a film featuring dialogue so crisp it reminded me of David Mamet’s heyday.  Again criminally underseen, “Black Bag” is so good you’ll want to go back and immediately re-watch it to catch everything you missed the first time.

1.  Marty Supreme

The year’s best example of a Paul Thomas Anderson style film comes to us not from Anderson himself but from John Safdie, whose “Marty Supreme” garners my vote as the year’s best picture. The chameleonic Timothee Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a rude, brash young ping-pong player who forces his way into an international competition by befriending a successful business magnate played by Kevin O’Leary (“Shark Tank”) in the best first-time acting performance I’ve seen in years.  Marty continually threads that fine line between enormous success and abject poverty, and he has the innate ability to talk himself into and out of most situations.  Chalamet’s over-the-top acting achievement is reminiscent of DiCaprio’s in “Wolf of Wall Street.”  We know the guy is corrupt, yet we find ourselves rooting for him.  And while “One Battle After Another” has a bit of a been-there done-that feel, “Marty Supreme” is a complete original.  It’s one of the best films so far this decade.

 

 

 

 

Andy Ray‘s reviews also appear on https://townepost.com/tag/film-reviews/