Best movies of 2025 ranked by AP film writers

AP:

The bean counters might say otherwise, but 2025 was a good year for movies. Hollywood is undergoing seismic changes, with yet another studio, Warner Bros., staring down a possible merger. This an industry that’s always under threat, though, and always seems to figure something out. If anything, 2025 was also a year in which audiences showed that they still crave the theatrical experience. The Associated Press’ film writers Lindsey Bahr and Jake Coyle’s give their picks for the best movies of 2025:

Lindsey Bahr’s top picks

1. One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson took us on ride of the year with One Battle After Another, which is so many things — a clever farce, a frenetic thrill ride, a poignant drama about single parenting, a buddy comedy — it’s nearly impossible to describe compellingly or coherently. The performances are excellent, the vision is ambitious and singular, and the payoff is a reminder of an experience that can only really happen at the movies.

2. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Mary Bronstein turned her own domestic nightmare into a raw and surreal cinematic expression of maternal exhaustion and madness. Anchored by an utterly fearless performance from Rose Byrne, Bronstein’s film is an exposed nerve come to life.

3. Marty Supreme

Great filmmakers can make anything exciting, like, say, the adventures of a broke table tennis player, and true SOB Marty Mauser, in mid-century New York. Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein built an enormously entertaining, white-knuckle spectacle of ambition and ego, giving us the defining Timothée Chalamet performance we’ve been waiting for.

4. Sentimental Value

The ghosts of the past and things unsaid linger in cracks and floorboards of the quiet home at the heart of Joachim Trier’s latest, a textured and mature portrait of family, grief, forgiveness and the loneliness of a life in the arts.

5. The Naked Gun

Finally, a great studio comedy and in the most unlikely of packages: A self-consciously shameless reboot/sequel/remake that stands on its own through Akiva Schaffer’s total commitment to absolute silliness. Only Hamnet elicited more tears.

Jake Coyle’s picks

1. One Battle After Another

For a movie that feels so enthrallingly of the moment, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest is curiously out of time. The echoes of the Black Panther and Weather Underground movements seem to belong to another era. Yet Anderson’s scruffy opus makes its own history and its own resistance. It’s about finding your own grammar of struggle. And it’s also about how unstoppable Teyana Taylor is.

2. No Other Choice

In Park Chan-wook’s masterful, midnight-black comedy, a newly out-of-work man (Lee Byung-hun) decides his best option to get a leg up on similarly qualified job applicants is to kill them, one by one. It’s an ingenious narrative (from Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 novel) that Park extrapolates in increasingly profound ways.

3. It Was Just an Accident

Jafar Panahi has made a lot of great films, many of them in extraordinary circumstances. So see his latest not just because it’s an important Iranian film, shot through with pain and fury, and made by one of the most courageous filmmakers on the planet, but because it’s gripping and funny and human.

4. Marty Supreme

The annals of great New York movies have a new one. Josh Safdie’s picaresque ping pong epic, starring Timothée Chalamet as a tireless striver, is the giddiest, most breathless movie of the year.

5. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Underestimate Rian Johnson’s whodunits at your peril. The latest chapter in the endlessly entertaining adventures of Benoit Blanc may be the best of the bunch. And it’s got Josh O’Connor, who put his stamp on the movie year in a handful of standout performances.