Directors Guillermo del Toro, Paul Thomas Anderson and Bi Gan led a year defined by risk and resistance
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Hollywood finds itself in the midst of one battle after another. David Ellison, the son of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, bought his way into the film industry, became a successful producer, and is seeking to take over the industry. After acquiring Paramount and its offshoots with the aid of daddy’s money, Ellison has pledged to drive DEI programs out of the business. Now, he and his father have orchestrated a hostile takeover of the Warner Bros. empire after Netflix’s bid was accepted over the Ellisons’. It’s enough to make you cry, come back, Disney. All is forgiven. A Hollywood run by Trump ass-kissing nepo babies of far-right tech billionaires? (Yeah, I know about David’s sister.) Release the Kraken. Two of the highest-grossing films of 2025 were Asian: “Ne Zha 2” ($2.2 billion) and “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” ($779 million). Disney’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch” made $1 billion, ditto for Warner Bros.’s video-game-based “A Minecraft Movie.” Movie theater attendance is not back to pre-pandemic levels. But it’s limping along. Does anybody in their right mind want to see “Avatar: Fire and Ash” in premium-priced 3D for over three hours? I guess so, but I’m not one. Marvel continued to stumble with “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Thunderbolts” and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” Pedro Pascal starred in the latter and also “Eddington,” “Materialists” and the last of “The Last of Us.” Has his fire sputtered? Jafar Panahi’s overrated “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Was it “Wicked : For Good” or “Wicked: Good For Nothing?” Robert Redford, David Lynch, Joan Plowright, Gene Hackman, Val Kilmer, Jean Marsh, Loretta Swit, Lalo Schifrin, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, Terence Stamp, Claudia Cardinale, Diane Keaton, Samantha Eggar, Lee Tamahori, Sally Kirkland, Udo Kier, Jimmy Cliff, Rob Reiner and Brigitte Bardot all shuffled off this mortal coil. “Sinners” combined vampire movies, blues and racial justice. Will Brazilian Wagner Moura score a first-ever best actor Oscar nomination for “The Secret Agent?” Chase Infiniti (Is she named after a robot?) made her screen debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” a timely portrait of an America torn by armed strife with Leonardo DiCaprio as a comical, bomb-making stoner and Sean Penn as a testosterone-fueled, fascist army officer who gets visibly aroused in the presence of the bomb-maker’s partner (Teyana Taylor). It was the year of Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney, although their films, “The Running Man” and “Christy,” respectively, were met with a shrug at the box office.
Below is my top 10 list for 2025, in no particular order.
‘Frankenstein’
Guillermo del Toro has waited all his life to bring his vision of Mary Shelley’s landmark science-fiction novel to the screen, and, inspired by the illustrations of artist Bernie Wrightson, del Toro has created a heady mixture of gods and monsters, romance and mad science, carnage and beauty and an Oedipal relationship that plays out at the end of the world. Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth and Jacob Elordi make up the year’s oddest love/(hate) triangle. Cinematography, production design and costume conjure a Gothic dreamworld. This is one for the ages.
‘One Battle After Another’
Inspired once again by American author Thomas Pynchon, the aforementioned Anderson delivers a portrait of a civil-war-torn America in which a tattered radical organization makes guerrilla-like attacks on a bank and an army compound, while an oppressive, far-right amalgamation of soldiers and billionaires tries to maintain control and murder its enemies. Benicio del Toro excels as a radical leader/martial arts sensei. A deeply jaundiced take on America, “One Battle After Another” is a witty satire in the scathing style of Voltaire and Erasmus.
‘Hamnet’
Academy Award-winner Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”) takes an acclaimed period novel by Maggie O’Farrell and turns it into a realistic vision of the love affair and marriage of the young William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and “forest witch” (here named) Agnes Hathaway (an enchanting Jessie Buckley), the tragic death of their young son Hamnet and how his father transformed his grief into a work of art known as “Hamlet,” arguably, the world’s greatest play. Yes, the film is sad, but it is also life-affirming, uplifting and beautiful, and the cast, including Emily Watson, is superb.
‘Sentimental Value’
Taking a cue from Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman and (like Bergman) Nordic modernist playwrights, Joachim Trier of “The Oslo Trilogy” has painted a portrait of modern Norway. Trier regular Renate Reinsve plays an actor crushed by depression, who turns down a role offered by her director father (a great Stellan Skarsgard), only to find a talented, upstart American (Elle Fanning) taking her place. It’s “All About Eve” meets “The House of the Seven Gables,” complete with a Norwegian “dragestil” and flashbacks to Norway’s WWII-era Nazi occupation and collaboration.
‘Resurrection’
From the breakout Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan comes a bizarre road movie that leaps through time and space, a celebration of the history and wonders of cinema. Set in a world where most people no longer dream, “seekers” enter the dreamworlds of renegades who still dream. Beginning in a dreamscape conjured by German Expressionism and the work of F.W. Murnau and ending with a 35-minute single take in a neon-lit, port city celebrating New Year’s Eve with a young man and woman, who may be in love, on the run from a criminal and his gang of killers. The film features Chinese dancer and boy band singer and film star Jackson Yee in multiple roles.
‘Misericordia’
A brilliant melding of the kinky frissons of writers Georges Simenon and Patricia Highsmith, Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia” places a magnifying glass on a small Ardeche town as a young baker (Felix Cysyl) returns for the funeral of his mentor, a man he loved. When the dead man’s brutish son (Jean-Baptiste Durand) goes missing, some rocks get turned over and disturbing things come to light, among them a full-frontal priest (Jacques Develay) and the rumor that the young man is having it off with the dead man’s beautifully aged widow (Catherine Frot).
‘Dead of Winter’
This totally overlooked icy film noir from executive producer and star Emma Thompson is about what happens when a heavily-armed, dead-eyed, drug addict kidnaps a young girl and encounters a maternal Minnesota widow who disapproves. Thompson is the brave, resourceful widow, Barb, and she is certainly difficult to extract. As the fentanyl stick-sucking, high-powered rifle-toting former nurse with a dying liver, Judy Greer is a monstrous revelation. As executive producer, Thompson no doubt had a hand in hiring “Game of Thrones” director Brian Kirk, Academy Award-winning composer Volker Bertelmann (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) and Emmy-nominated cinematographer Christopher Ross (“Shogun”). Set in Minnesota, shot in Finland, “Dead of Winter” is better even than Thompson’s current streaming hit, “Down Cemetery Road.”
‘Caught by the Tides’
Together with his wife and muse Zhao Tao, Chinese Sixth Generation auteur Jia Zhang-ke has fashioned a modern-day feminine “Odyssey” out of unused footage, spanning 22 years of film from previous entries, primarily the acclaimed 2006 effort “Still Life.” Blending fiction and documentary techniques, Zhang-ke follows a dancer and club girl named Qiao Qiao (Tao, who does not speak a word of dialogue) as her shady boss and lover leaves her. She travels up the Yangtze River in search of him. It is a journey through time and a completely original achievement, combining an ageless love story with the history of 21st-century China, ending with Qiao Qiao in the era of robots.
‘Souleymane’s Story’
A documentary-like tale featuring non-professional actors, this Cannes award-winner is a knockout. It tells the story of an African immigrant named Souleymane (talented newcomer Abou Sangare) in Paris who must run the gauntlet, facing young foreigners, trying to survive by working in terribly demanding, low-paying jobs, while trying to obtain legal documents to remain in France. Souleymane rides a scooter through the mean streets of Paris, delivering food and other items. The scooter’s owner, whose identity card Soulweymane uses to work, takes a large percentage of Souleymane’s earnings. It’s just the way of this very mean world.
‘Nouvelle Vague’
A fictionalized depiction of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark French New Wave effort, “Breathless” (1960), “Nouvelle Vague” is a film buff’s dream come true. Zoey Deutch is a complete delight as young American star Jean Seberg, who agrees to take a chance on first-time director Godard (a witty Guillaume Marbeck) and his shot-in-the-streets Parisian film noir about a charming thief played by Godard buddy Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and his cheeky American girlfriend. Shot in glorious black & white and mostly spoken in French, “Nouvelle Vague” is a tribute to a group of French film critics who decided to become filmmakers and who changed world cinema for the better and were the spiritual mothers and fathers of American indie cinema.
Honorable Mentions: ‘The Phoenician Scheme,” “Bonjour Tristesse,” “The Shrouds,” “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” “Highest 2 Lowest,” “The Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt,” “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” “Rebuilding,” “A Little Prayer,” “The Tale of Silyan,” “Sirat,” “Sinners” and “When Fall Is Coming.”
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