Michael Frank’s Top 10 Films of 2025
by Michael Frank · The Film StageFollowing The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2025, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.
I’ve been lucky to see so many movies over the last year, to speak with filmmakers, to experience film festivals, to see movies with friends, family, and loved ones. Some incredible movies came out in 2025, and the year will likely be remembered for those top-tier films and performances.
But this year-end list is an opportunity to highlight films and experiences that made 2025 a special year, despite all of the chaos, stress, and difficulty. These films aren’t necessarily the “best” films I’ve seen this year, and there are still several movies I haven’t seen yet, but they all made an impact on me. Sometimes, a fun time at the movies is more than enough to leave a lasting impression. For me, these movies defined my life in 2025.
Honorable Mentions: Urchin (Harris Dickinson), Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor), Hamnet (Chloe Zhao), Eephus (Carson Lund), Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)
10. Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)
Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day is a low-key, 76-minute portrait of an artist living in 1974 New York. With Ben Whishaw as Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, Sachs’ film follows these two as they walk, sit, smoke, and eat around Hujar’s apartment on a day like any other. It’s a movie contemplating the price of artistry, the difficulty in creation, and the idea that an artist is always doubting their work. As Hujar relays his day to his friend, using the real transcripts from an interview in 1974, the film meditates on what a day contains and how we use our time. Whishaw is incredible and his easy chemistry with Hall glides this film into an artistic lullaby, absorbing in its simplicity.
9. Lurker (Alex Russell)
Alex Russell’s Lurker tackles similar themes as other movies surrounding fame in the digital age, but any doubts about his confidence (and his ability) are dispelled with the film’s final moments with one of the best endings of the year. Lurker looks at the uneasy relationship between a fan-turned-entouragee named Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) and a rising music star in Oliver (Archie Madekwe). Russell’s psychosexual thriller is a treatise on fandom, the fame industry, and the act of hustling. Pellerin and Madekwe have a restless compatibility, and Russell uses VHS-camcorder film to further push his narrative of the intense symbiosis between fan and artist. To Russell, in his fantastic debut, they need each other.
8. Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg)
During a time in Hollywood in which franchise IP continues to sink lower, Predator: Badlands seems to be the exception. Dan Trachtenberg, who has handled the Predator franchise since 2022’s Prey, has become a sure pair of hands, a director with such innate knowledge on how to flip and turn a known quantity into something unique, fun, and endlessly watchable. Badlands is just that, focusing on a young Predator named Dek and his quest to reclaim his pride by killing a monster to claim his place in society. It’s a straightforward premise done well. Badlands doesn’t feature any humans, instead placing a great Elle Fanning in a dual humanoid role to offset the wide array of creatures in this world. But Badlands is just popcorn fun, theatergoing at its most enjoyable, and a franchise installment that’s pushing the story forward, rather than recycling the past.
7. Weapons (Zach Cregger)
Weapons is a layered, taut horror, using character chapters as bookmarks for the audience. Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian swells, succeeding on constant momentum, despite its structured approach. A story about disappearing children in a small town, Weapons is about loss, abandonment, and panic. It’s about the fear of needles, of HIV, of losing a child, of losing a parent, of being wrong, of losing control, of being controlled. It’s about the fear of everything. Amy Madigan leads an ensemble cast, all of which thrive with Cregger’s direction. She must be disarming yet terrifying, harmless yet pure evil. The film balances a tone mixed with fury, regret, and horror, and once all the pieces are on the board, Cregger’s film offers immense, deranged catharsis.
6. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Park Chan-wook’s signature blend of dark comedy and brutal violence makes No Other Choice a film that could only be made by him. Using an out-of-work paperman who starts murdering the job competition, the latest from the South Korean auteur finds invention in a story all-too-similar to the current status of job hunting. But No Other Choice surprised me in the angles it chose to place the camera. Park has always been skilled and surprising in his cinematography, yet his work on this film with Kim Woo-hyung elevated the material’s dramatic and comedic stakes. With a standout performance by Lee Byung-hun as the frustrated, incapable, absurdist family man, No Other Choice thrives. Park doesn’t miss.
5. Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
Timothee Chalamet is pure electricity in Josh Safdie’s frenetic 1950s ping pong drama, Marty Supreme. Playing an early 20s grifter named Marty Mauser, Chalamet embodies the pursuit of perceived greatness, despicable and charming in his obsession. Joining Chalamet are Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A’zion, and Kevin O’Leary, all perfectly cast in the world Safdie created. It’s breakneck, exploring grittiness pretending to be opulence and cycles of manipulation by these characters. The score by Daniel Lopatin and production design by Jack Fisk build the world (specifically, New York City) around Marty, as he attempts to achieve the American ideals of individual achievement and exceptionalism. Chalamet gives the performance of the year, the best of his career.
4. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a vampire thriller about twin brothers in 1930s Mississippi, aims to explore the appropriation, colonization, power, and connection of blues music. Starring Michael B. Jordan as the Smokestack Twins, in his greatest performances outside of Creed, the film represents a big, bloody swing by Coogler, a director who has been in the Marvel machine for the last 10 years making the best of that conglomerate. In Sinners, music is everything, transcendent in its potentiality, bridging the past, present, and future. Miles Caton is a revelation as Preacher Boy, embodying this music with his body and soul. It rewards return viewings, growing in excitement and depth with second and third watches. Coogler creates a fully-realized community, a place that’s often getting through the day to dance through the night.
3. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag combines sex and wordplay to achieve its tension. Featuring a knockout ensemble of British supporting actors alongside Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, the film spins treasonous spies into Sherlockean detectives, dinner parties into confessionals, and conversations into violence. Soderbergh explores honesty and loyalty with a group of dishonest adults, intermingled by pushing past professional and personal boundaries. It takes place in dining rooms with wine glasses and expensive food, filled with conversations that don’t need raised voices to be menacing. It’s a delicious film to experience, where the actors have tangible chemistry and excitement comes from the metaphorical (and physical) twist of the knife. Soderbergh remains underrated and underseen, prolific in his capacity to delight.
2. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Four years after Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson returned with One Battle After Another, a politicized epic set across the state of California. Following a father, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), as they’re chased by militaristic ghosts from the past, Anderson’s film is one of those rare films that immediately becomes a classic. It has immense staying power, capable of worming inside your mind and sitting there for hours, days, months. It’s overwhelming, despicable, violent, hilarious, sweet, and sprawling in its vision, using the California landscape to enrich this story of racists and radicals. Every member of the cast fits into this world, with too many good performances to count, from Benicio del Toro to Teyana Taylor. Anderson skewers the revolutionaries and the racists alike, laughing with the former and at the latter. It’s exhilarating to watch a film like One Battle After Another, knowing that everyone is at the top of their craft, the peak of their powers. It might not be my favorite film of the year, but it’s 2025’s greatest piece of filmmaking, and it’s sure to be remembered as such.
1. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, written with his collaborator Greg Kwedar, looks at the life of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) through the 20th century. It’s an intimate story of a supposedly normal, quiet man, someone who’s living his life from job to job, day to day. Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, the film follows Grainier as he experiences the highs and lows of being alive, the loss of family and the immense pleasure of love. It depicts reality as a set of days and people passing by, in no particular order, the world enveloping someone as they walk through the woods. Grainier feels pain, joy, and every emotion in-between, as Bentley crafts a natural world around him, complete with baby blue skies, massive trees, warm fires, and hands to hold. I felt Train Dreams as I watched it. I felt the softness of the grass, the coarseness of a tree’s bark, the cool of a rushing river, and a whistling wind. Bentley’s film is tactile, grounded in the simple beauty of the Earth and the quiet humility of Edgerton as Grainier. Train Dreams is a special film, focused on the enormous essence and responsibility of being, washing over us as we wake up each morning.