Tina Kakadelis
Yesterday, we revealed part one of Film Obsessive’s Best Films of 2025. Today, we’re back with eleven more of our staff’s favorite movies of the year. From long walks through dystopian wastelands, a cure to male loneliness, art heists, and a life-affirming Stephen King adaptation, take a look at part two of Film Obsessive’s Best of 2025 list.
The Long Walk
The ending of The Long Walk did a few things to me simultaneously. It made me applaud. So help me, as a viewer, I am drawn into the cathartic kind of violence, wherein a nasty, purely hate-able character is taken out, and when the final scene happened, I loved it. At the same time, I felt sick, not because of my reaction but because of what it means for the other character in the scene. Sure, I applauded what happened, but I was aware of what came next, and I hated that. However, I could see no other outcome.
If I am vague, it is because The Long Walk is a film that deserves to be watched without any information beforehand. For me, I knew this was based on a Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King) novel of the same name, and I knew it was about young men walking a long distance. That was it. When I watched this in the comfort of my living room earlier this year, I was stuck by just how political the film is, even though no political parties or affiliations are mentioned.
Sometime in the future, the United States will be so bad that young men will sign up to walk. Whoever is left standing wins. Wins what? Does it even matter? To me, the answer was unequivocally no. The point was not the prize (or so I believed during most of the film’s runtime). It was that these young men were in such states that they felt the need to sign up for a competition like this, knowing full well what could await them within a few days’ time.
Of course, I was sort of wrong. This film isn’t about the journey or the destination. That’s binary thinking, because it’s clearly about both. The Long Walk wants us to consider the state of the country in the not-too-distant future, but it also wants us to consider what it means to get vengeance for such a world. After all, I find myself applauding Pete’s actions at the end, but I also have to come to terms with what happens after. It’s open to interpretation, I suppose, yet it’s clear to me what happens to Pete, and it’s sickening.
Imagine the journey Pete, as well as the film’s protagonist Ray, has to go through, only for what happens at the end to happen. When we live in a world that hurts us and drives us to extremes, what comes next after we fight back? I’m genuinely curious if the last scene of the movie changes anything at all. Most likely, things stay relatively the same. Still, it’s important to consider the possibility that viewers could’ve seen the beginning of a revolution. Then again, perhaps that me and my optimistic look at life.
Ultimately, The Long Walk ponders relationships in a world that sucks. Yes, we can stick together, and we can love and mourn those we lose in our journey to the finish line. When we get there, it’s up to us to decide what to do next. Do we take our shot, or do we do something entirely different? I honestly don’t know what I’d do, but the fact that this film got me to ponder such questions amazes me, because The Long Walk is an entertaining film. It’s also a movie that asks us to think about our world and our future in it. — Michael Suarez
Sinners
Easily my film of 2025, Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror movie Sinners smashed people’s expectations and became one of the most talked about films of the year. Eschewing several typical vampire tropes, Sinners took a period approach, but instead of tired old gothic settings, decided instead to use the Mississippi Delta of 1932 to explore ideas of black culture and music, and the black struggle for social mobility, something which still is sadly as relevant now as it was in 1932. And all with added grotesque bloodsuckers too!
Michael B. Jordan shows great skill and care in his performance as both of the Smokestack Twins, contrasting well the business-like, simmering Elijah with the more devil-may-care Elias, but it is twenty-year-old Miles Caton as Sammie who truly steals the show, bringing the blues to a modern audience in a completely vibrant, life-affirming way, his voice and guitar blessing as beautiful as the vampires he confronts are deadly and thirsty for blood.
An original take on the vampire tale, with a surprising amount of depth beneath the bloodsucking, Sinners felt fresh and vital, and a triumph of imaginative, creative filmmaking. — Chris Flackett
Baby Invasion
2025 has generated a lot of talk about how the language of cinema is changing due to the dominance of video games and online culture, and the possibility that cinema is slowly morphing into some hybrid experience of cinema/IMAX, gaming, virtual reality, and whatever comes next. Yet, few filmmakers have made anything that dives as headlong into that new hybrid frontier as Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion.
It’s difficult to describe exactly what Baby Invasion is, which is part of why it captivates. The film would surely be described in different terms by someone well-versed in gaming, particularly someone who leans toward the first-person dystopic chaos genre. It sometimes feels more like a gallery or installation piece—one that might be playing (as Korine arranged with its “sister” film Aggro Dr1ft) in a strip club.
There are a lot of rabbits to chase in unpacking Baby Invasion, and a literal one that occasionally seems to guide the dangerous, sleepwalking POV of the film—perhaps a reincarnation of the rabbit-eared kid in Gummo who has now grown up, taken a handful of random pills, and is starring in his own hallucinatory version of Alice in Wonderland. The surrealist and avant-garde evocations are rich throughout, with Korine coming off a lot like a modern-day Jean Cocteau. Their creative philosophies feel akin in many ways—assured in the inability of the subconscious gesture to make something like a mistake. In Cocteau’s “The Art of Cinema,” the surrealist quotes another contemporary’s take on his work—the same sort of self-grandeur we see Korine play up from time to time—stating: “He knows how far one can afford to go too far.”
Of course, this is the 1930’s version of calling yourself an “edge lord.” While I imagine some now write Korine off as such, I would suggest he’s folded that entire criticism into his aesthetic evolution perfectly—in fact, the production moniker that labels Baby Invasion is EDGLRD. I should also note that Baby Invasion, while often being a quite disturbing first-person home invasion depiction of violent excess, is also quite beautiful. And stunningly trippy. Korine uses the cluttered, trashy aesthetic of online gaming to an elevated effect—as gun-toting, pill-popping agitators in digitally masked baby heads careen violently through wealthy homes the screen is splashed with the cryptic, unrelenting threads that characterize the screen-addled brains of a generation. The aggressive and murky techno score by Burial drives the film as the scrolling commentary trickles down the margins of the screen—”more vibes than a Soundcloud rapper”…”victory laps in life r a myth”…”my kind of nihilism”—a ceaseless, anonymous, collective commentary that is an inextricable part of current visual culture.
I think Cocteau would have liked it a lot—a new manifestation of his ideal for cinema to become a collective dream, and a reinforcement of his belief that “an art that is not accessible to the young will never be art.”
Like Korine’s VHS excursion Trash Humpers, Baby Invasion feels like an unexpected visual artifact dug out of a strange Florida thrift store bin, and like his masterpiece Spring Breakers it feels uniquely adept at painting a portrait of the American id that many don’t want to acknowledge. Call it a gallery piece or a movie—art or trash—what Baby Invasion ultimately does so bluntly and beautifully is to turn the current state of masked and anonymous violence perpetrated on the immigrant population back on the affluent. — Jason Hedrick
Friendship
Friendship is like a Judd Apatow comedy by way of Ari Aster. It’s as unsettling as it is hilarious. As with most Tim Robison characters, you have no idea if you should laugh at Craig or feel really bad for him. The wonderfully genius thing about Friendship is that Craig isn’t the only weirdo. Not even close. His adventurous neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) seems mentally stuck in high school. His wife Tami (Kate Mara) and son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer) have a suspiciously close relationship. These people have no problem fitting in to society despite their quirks. Craig just happens to be the wrong kind of weird, no matter how hard he tries to relate.
Friendship is an important film for a few different reasons. It’s a counter to the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ discourse that has ravaged the internet in the past few years. The film asks, ‘are men lonely or are they severely undersocialized?’ Men like Craig are generally allowed to be unsocialized. From the outside, it doesn’t seem to make a difference at all. Craig has met all pf the societal standards of success. He has a nice house, a ‘real’ job, a wife and kid, he accomplished life. He feels like, because of this, people owe him friendship without having to put in the effort. Friendship pokes fun at our rising antisocial tendencies and puts a mirror to the men responsible for this issue. — Matthew Percefull
Mickey 17
How do you follow the pitch-black comedy of a massive success like Parasite? If you’re director Bong Joon Ho, then you make an also-pitch-black comedy, this time in the science fiction mould, tackling such themes as bio-printing, life versus its expendability, colonialism, as well as thinly veiled critiques of Donald Trump and Trumpian politics. You make Mickey 17.
Such heavy topics could have led to a draining viewing experience, but it is to Bong Joon Ho’s credit that he balances these well with humour. There’s something wonderfully absurdist about the inevitability that Robert Patterson’s early Mickey clones meet their mortal fate, only to be printed out and brought back to ‘life’ again and again. Naomi Ackie’s Nasha finding out that two Mickey clones exist at the same time, only to be aroused by the idea of being in a relationship with both them, is a neat twist humorously played, and also highlights the humanness underneath the high concepts.
Mark Ruffalo is a blast as Kenneth Marshall, Trump in all but name, while Patterson presents his own version of ‘Marvin the Paranoid Android’ as the resigned, world-weary Mickey 17, while his much more aggressive Mickey 18 is tense, ready to explode at any moment. Much like the world Mickey 17 itself presents. — Chris Flackett
The Mastermind
If absolutely nothing else, 2025 is Josh O’Connor’s year. The English actor’s presence in four new releases this year, each of them wildly distinctive performances, is a potent display of both his prowess in a variety of roles, and also how the industry has finally started to wake up to his talents. His leading role in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind — another slow-burn demonstration of the master filmmaker’s incredible penchant for genre deconstruction — is perhaps the scuzziest of them all, a kind of anti-Soderbergh protagonist who carries all of the associated deviousness while possessing none of the charm or charisma, and very much by design.
Here, O’Connor is J.B. Mooney, an unemployed father living with his family in 1970s Massachusetts with aspirations of becoming an art thief, who takes an interest in his local art museum and eventually hatches a plan to take several artworks with a troupe of co-conspirators. But anyone already aware of Reichardt’s style and sensibilities will immediately be satisfied with the deliberate, pervasive air of frustration that follows, as J.B.’s plan goes horribly, hilariously awry at every single turn, and the film gradually unmoors itself from traditional structure and progression as J.B.’s goals unfurl into total aimlessness. With a wry, bitter sense of humor sprinkled throughout the failures of masculinity behind J.B.’s every action, The Mastermind is a patiently telegraphed tour through how one man steadily sabotages his own life and implodes his family for an ephemeral moment of glory — and culminates in a jarring yet deeply satisfying ending that presents with quiet fury the consequences of being so totally detached from a world in flux around you. — James Y. Lee
Black Bag
Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh has consistently proven, over the past 30 years, that he can work in any genre of film he chooses to explore. He has his self-made reputation and auteur tendencies, yet, every now and then, the Oceans trilogy steward crafts a new shiny object for the “cool” wing of his filmography. In 2025, Soderbergh did just that by following up his first 2025 theatrical release—the highly praised supernatural thriller Presence— with the polished espionage caper Black Bag, starring the likes of fellow Oscar winner Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
Black Bag follows Fassbender’s British counterintelligence agent George Woodhouse progressing through difficult new orders assigned to him by his superior (Pierce Brosnan). George has been given one week to identify and neutralize a mole within his department team. His group of suspects is populated with a tight-knit group of couples (including Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomi Harris, and Rege-Jean Page) who have worked in close quarters and on dangerous missions for years, including his own wife, Kathryn (Blanchett).
Unlike other spy thrillers where such a dynamic cast would be responsible for stacking double-crosses on top of triple-crosses with elaborate and nonsensical twists, Black Bag takes a more intelligent and sneaky approach. In this case, the mice are easy for the cat to find and familiar. It’s more of which mouse will squeak the slightest wrong way first while the cat watches intently without the need to chase. The engrossing hooks of its smartness make this movie a clever blast of style and showmanship. It goes to show that when Steven Soderbergh is working in his “cool” gear, he simply does not miss. — Don Shanahan
The Phoenician Scheme
Wes Anderson’s latest (and, arguably, greatest), The Phoenician Scheme follows wealthy businessman Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) who appoints his estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton) as sole heir to his estate, a decision that propels the both of them into an array of deadly shenanigans. The whimsically dark comedy operates as both a return to form and a pivot for the American auteur, whose iconic, equal parts colorful and symmetrical style is perfected in each and every frame of The Phoenician Scheme. Even longtime fans of Anderson will be blown away by the technical mastery on display throughout the jam-packed film.
Not only is the movie itself astoundingly pleasing to the eyes, the story is full of passion—a determined, yet desperate man attempts to save his own skin, his fortune, and, later, his newfound relationship with his only daughter from the clutches of various greedy characters who wriggle their way into Korda’s elaborate, yet expertly-explained scheme. Threapleton delivers a standout performance as deadpan nun Sister Liesl, her faith-based mentality juxtaposing beautifully against Korda’s unwaveringly logical approach to his years-in-the-making scheme.
Finally, the appearance of several new and familiar faces to the Anderson filmography—from Michael Cera as awkward tutor Bjørn to Bill Murray as God (literally)—adds even more delight to this surreal ode to storytelling. The Phoenician Scheme is not only a grand ‘ol time of a watch, it also proves Wes Anderson was truly made to make unapologetically wacky, heartfelt movies like this one. — Natalie D.C.
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Sweet and smart, James Griffiths’ The Ballad of Wallis Island both induces and critiques nostalgia and does so with a spry script, gorgeous setting, and delightful cast. It may be wispy and wistful but it’s no lightweight. Charles (Tim Key), a lottery winner living the life of a hermit on isolated, windswept Wallis Island, is perhaps the biggest fan of the fictional McGwyer & Mortimer, a folksy duo whose sweet romantic ballads captured a moment in time when the two singers, Herb (Tom Basden) and Nell (Carey Mulligan), were not only musical partners but also former lovers.
The two separately and reluctantly accept Charles’s invitation to reunite, even though next to no one inhabits the tiny island where he imagines they will perform. As first Herb and then Nell arrive at Wallis Island, their music—both as recorded in the distant past and tentatively performed once again as fragile rehearsal duets—once again comes alive. Basden and Mulligan are perfect as former lovers forever bound by song, and their music is sublime. But when the plans for both the concert and the romantic reunion go awry, the real plot kicks in, forcing all three to confront their pasts, presents, and futures in ways that are both surprising and touching. The Ballad of Wallis Island is itself like a great folk song from the past, unearthing dormant emotions with its pitch-perfect performances. — J Paul Johnson
The Naked Gun
The Naked Gun is a comedy the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. Akiva Schaffer’s legacy sequel/remake of the Zucker and Abrahams classic is a comedy that isn’t concerned about the quality of the joke, but the quantity. It isn’t looking for one big laugh every twenty minutes; it’s looking for twenty laughs in five minutes.
Like the Zucker and Abrahams films and the various other movies in the parody genre, The Naked Gun is filled with non-stop jokes and bits, and they come in at a rapid-fire pace. It’s one of the movies where if you laugh too hard or too long, you’ll miss the next one. And the best part? The jokes are hilarious. Credit to Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand for giving us jokes that are at times incredibly clever and other times remarkably lowbrow, and to Liam Neeson for delivering the jokes with a perfect cadence in a performance I didn’t know he had in him.
Does the plot matter? Definitely not. Are the characters developed? Not even a little. Do we care? Not at all. The Naked Gun is non-stop hilarity for 90 minutes and is the best studio comedy of the decade. — Kevin Wozniak
The Life of Chuck
What does it mean to die? This is the central question posed in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella. Told in three vignettes, in reverse chronological order, The Life of Chuck tells the story of a boy, and later a man, named Charles “Chuck” Kranz, whose parents die when he is very young. Sometime later, he confronts death again, and again, as we all do the older we get. “It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part,” Chuck’s grandfather tells him at one point (the line is repeated elsewhere in the film), and I suppose that’s true. We all know death will come for us one day, and we could dwell on that inevitability, or we can choose to simply live our lives, however long or short they may be.
What Chuck understands when he is 17 is that, yes, death will come for him, but he will live regardless. He will choose to dance with a stranger one day, because he will be moved to. He will choose to have a wife and a child, because he will fall in love. He will choose to accept the end of his life because he knew it was coming. But don’t we all know? The film asks us if we will accept our fate or fight it. To be fair, this could be seen as an unfair question, as some people don’t live long enough to have a family or even fall in love. Others die in horrific and violent ways. And yet, the question remains.
Death will come for us all. The waiting should not be the hardest part. If we knew how and when we would die, would that change anything? More importantly, I suppose, should it change anything? The film argues that it shouldn’t. If I know that I will one day die of a brain tumor, I will not waste my life waiting for that to happen. By the same token, even if I never learn about that, I will not waste my life waiting. Of course, it’s easier said than done.
Still, I like to think I have a part of Chuck in me, in that if the opportunity arises, I, too, will rise to the occasion. Chuck dances with a stranger in front of other strangers because he is moved to. He will come to understand that perhaps everything existed just so that moment could happen. It’s a beautiful sentiment. Perhaps a bit selfish, but it’s honest. What moment will I look back on during my final days? I’m sure it will be a moment that mattered a lot to me, and it might not have a single thing to do with my family or friends.
Mike Flanagan is an excellent writer and director. He’s not flashy, but his direction always serves the story being told, whether it’s television like The Haunting of Hill House or a film like Doctor Sleep. He likes to get out of the way of his characters to let them speak, and I love it when his characters get speeches. There’s one that involves quoting Carl Sagan’s words about the cosmic calendar, and it gives me chills just thinking about it. Frankly, the entire first third of the film gives me chills. One day, the world that exists within us will cease to exist. This is okay, I think. No, the waiting isn’t the hardest part. The dying is, but it’s going to happen. We must accept it. Only then can we truly live. — Michael Suarez
Train Dreams
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is both an American epic and an intimate portrait of a man caught in a changing world. The film follows Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a logger and railroad worker at the turn of the 20th century, who witnesses the beauty, loss, and randomness of life. It tells an epic American story but feels intimate due to its perfectly meditative pacing and its focus on Granier and Edgerton’s subtle but brilliant. In under two hours, Bentley delivers a rich, lived-in story about getting lost in time. Train Dreams is a beautiful movie in every way imaginable. Visually, it is one of the best-looking movies of 2025. The cinematography from Adolpho Veloso is extraordinary, immersing us in the stunning locations filled with eye-popping forestry. The score matches the film’s epic but intimate feeling, at times quiet and other times sweeping. Train Dreams’ story and emotion are matched perfectly by its craft. — Kevin Wozniak
Cloud
Japanese suspense-maven Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Pulse) knows just exactly how to take a hidebound premise and lather it up in smarts and style: his tech-neo-noir thriller Cloud hits all the right beats, taking its mild-mannered protagonist on a wild ride into the dark realm of Japan’s internet black market. Yoshi (Masaki Suda) is the milquetoast everyman living a humdrum life in one of his home country’s countless factories, just another headcount employee going through the motions. At least, that is, until he stumbles upon a winning scheme to pilfer a stash of inventory and resell the goods online.
Yoshi’s is a plan that works even better once scaled up, and the more Yoshi sells, the more he makes: soon he’s successful enough to attract a little too much attention. The threat quickly escalates, involving (gulp!) at one point both a livestream and a blowtorch! Both Yoshi’s girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) and his assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) figure prominently in Cloud‘s delightfully bloody climax. Cloud is in some ways a standard thriller, but it’s full of sly surprises and revelations. It’s one of those too-rare films that simply works, from start to finish, set-up to denouement, even with one great last line to look forward to at its conclusion. — J Paul Johnson
Weapons
The anticipation for Zach Cregger’s follow up to 2022’s Barbarian was huge, and while the jury is still out (at least for me) on whether Weapons surpasses his previous effort or not, what I can say is that Weapons is a gripping horror mystery that raises as many questions as it answers.
The starting point for the plot is brilliant: seventeen children from the same third-grade class all leave their homes at the same time in the middle of the night and subsequently disappear. Rather than focus on what has happened specifically to the children, allowing them instead to perpetuate the mystery, Cregger wisely uses the disappearance as a pivot for an exploration of a town that tears itself apart in the aftermath of a traumatic event, bringing parts of the town back together again at the end only when ready to resolve the mystery.
The structure, based around focusing on individual characters in segments, allows for an overlapping of character stories whilst giving the film an episodic feel (is this the horror Pulp Fiction? I’m only semi-joking…). While this could vary in quality, depending on the segment, ultimately the structure worked, keeping things fun as you pieced the whole together.
Weapons feels like a film that will divide viewers in the long run. But for this viewer, the mystery definitely worked its magic on me. — Chris Flackett
