For all of the angst on the business side of the American film industry, artistically speaking, 2025 was an excellent year at the movies. Since I hate ranking things, I give out awards. Here’s my take on the best of the year.

Worst Picture: Snow White

If you’re ever feeling imposter syndrome, just remember that grown men possessing essentially unlimited resources looked at those dwarfs and said, “Yes, that’s how I want my movie to look.”

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Creeper Leader, Mickey 17

Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi parable featured Robert Pattinson dying a dozen deaths on a wintry planet dominated by tardigrade-type creatures. The Creepers are just trying to be good neighbors, but the expedition’s leader (Mark Ruffalo) thinks they’re a threat, so the king-sized Leader of the Creepers (voiced by Anna Mouglalis) pulls off an epic bluff which ultimately brings down the colony’s power structure.

MVP: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

It’s fitting that this is the second time I’ve awarded Jordan the Most Valuable Player of the year because this is the year he played two people at once. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a dazzling feat of filmmaking, but it would all be for naught if it weren’t for Jordan’s titanic performances as the Smokestack twins. This has got to be one of the most technically challenging roles in the history of cinema. Jordan makes it look easy.

Jacob Elordi as The Creature. (Courtesy Netflix)

Best Abomination: Frankenstein

Guillermo del Toro fulfills his destiny by creating the best take on Mary Shelley’s monstrous fable since the days of James Whale and Boris Karloff. The lavish production design surrounded strong performances by Jacob Elordi and Oscar Isaac as the creature and its creator, locked in a father-son conflict that neither can see their way out of.

Emma Stone in *Bugonia* (Courtesy Focus Features)

Baldest Picture: Bugonia

Emma Stone is a ruthless pharmaceutical executive who gets a radical makeover when paranoid beekeeper Jesse Plemons kidnaps her and shaves her head. He thinks she’s an alien invader who communicates with her mothership via hairlike antennae. Yorgos Lanthimos’ meditation on why people believe weird things succeeds where the Covid conspiracy flick Eddington failed.

Creepiest Picture: Weapons

Don’t go searching for much deeper meaning in Zach Cregger’s horror breakout. He’s just here to creep you out with this tale of a town whose children mysteriously disappear into the night. Amy Madigan’s aggressively eerie wine auntie will haunt your dreams.

*No Other Choice* (Courtesy CJ Entertainment)

Foolproof Plan Award: No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook’s bare-knuckled satire of late-stage capitalism is devastatingly funny. After Man-su (a brilliant Lee Byung-hun) is laid off from his job at the paper mill, he’s desperate for work. When he finds his dream job opening, there’s only one thing to do: kill everyone else in South Korea who is qualified for the position. What could possibly go wrong?

Mila Kunis, Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor in *Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery*. (Courtesy Netflix © 2025)

Best Screenplay: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

In this third outing with Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, Rian Johnson brings new depth to the locked-room mystery story. When firebrand priest Wicks (Josh Brolin) is inexplicably killed in front of a congregation full of witnesses, suspicion falls on his young rival Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor). Johnson expertly uses the whodunnit as a vehicle to dissect organized religion.

(left to right) Hugh Jackman as Mike Sardina and Kate Hudson as Claire Stengl in director Craig Brewer’s *Song Sung Blue*, a Focus Features release (Photo: Courtesy of Focus Features)

Best Stealth Musical: Song Sung Blue

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson star as Lighting & Thunder, a real-life couple of musicians who found fleeting fame interpreting the songs of Neil Diamond. Craig Brewer’s tearjerker wrings every last bit of emotion out of the musical performances which form the backbone of this story of a family’s resilience in the face of tragedy.

Best Documentary: Natchez

Suzannah Herbert embedded her film crew in the plantation houses of Natchez, Mississippi, where the tourist trade meets the Lost Cause mythology of the Old South. But a new generation of tour guides tells the truth about the brutal slavery which underpinned all the grandeur.

Benicio Del Toro in *One Battle After Another* (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

Best Picture: One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson perfectly captures the zeitgeist of an America on the edge in this loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Leonardo DiCaprio is a revolutionary known as Rocketman who helps a guerrilla group, the French 75s, liberate a camp full of detained immigrants. His girlfriend Perfidia (a fierce Teyana Taylor) strikes up a sadomasochistic affair with Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). When she’s captured, Rocketman is left to raise their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) by himself while running from the feds. Sixteen years later, their past catches up with them. This revolutionary masterpiece couldn’t come at a better time.

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