The Best of the Rest: 2025 Edition

As I write every year, the Oscars are a very imperfect mechanism to recognize a year in film; there’s just too much good stuff that’s left out. As time goes on, and overlooked films get a fresh life, slights become snubs and today’s frustrations turn into historical injustices. That probably won’t be the fate of every film I’ll mention below, but only time will tell.

Without further ado and for your recommendation, here are the movies I saw in 2025 that didn’t get nominated for any Oscars; plenty are nevertheless worth your time.

They really had a chance:

No Other Choice 

• Grade: A-

• Thoughts: What else does Park Chan-Wook need to do? Here he’s made a wonderfully dark and entertaining film that wends together criticisms of late capitalism and the global economy, automation, and his usual unpredictability to craft something that is idiosyncratic yet universally perfect for this moment. It’s funny, wry, thrilling and wrenching at every turn, and I think time is already being very kind to it.

Sorry, Baby

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: This is a really nice debut, and I was so excited to see it get recognition at the Golden Globes; first-timers this small rarely do. Eva Victor brings their unique sense of offbeat humor and drapes it around a delicately told story of sexual assault survival that may have tipped too hard into trauma or melodrama and never does.

Wake Up Dead Man

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: While never fully returning to the perfectly assembled form of the first Knives Out, Rian Johnson vastly improves over the self-satisfied stuntiness of Glass Onion. Where the first two films focused on social class in the Trump era and the “brilliance” of tech billionaires, this film takes aim at the institution of religion and its toxic, often political arm with a surprising amount of empathy and restraint. Josh O’Connor playing a priest under suspicion for a murder he didn’t commit is the key not just to the film’s mystery, but its entire thematic approach. Job well done, I say.

Nouvelle Vague

• Grade: B-

• Thoughts: This is a fun watch! The film isn’t just rooted in the visual language that Godard more or less invented, but also the breakneck structural language. Guillaume Marbeck as Godard and Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo alone are worth the price of admission (or a Netflix subscription).

Jay Kelly

• Grade: C+

• Thoughts: This is a pretty charming if thematically thin movie despite the best efforts of everyone involved. It’s a partial memorialization of Clooney’s career, and I like him as much as the next guy, but this movie’s desperation to find a deeper story beyond that doesn’t always work out. Clooney is very good, Sandler is as well, but if the best part of the movie features Billy Crudup and is only 20 minutes in, you're in trouble.

Hedda

• Grade: C+

• Thoughts: It’s an all-in-one-night tale of a New Year’s Eve party gone wrong, with overlapping arcs of betrayal and jealousy that threaten to unravel at any moment. I really should like that more, especially when paired with a blend of modern and period sensibilities and anchored by an awesome performance from Tessa Thompson, who’s great basically all the time. I just didn’t get as involved as I should have, and maybe that’s my fault.

Contenders in my heart (they never had a chance)

Black Bag

• Grade: A-

• Thoughts: This is kind of everything I want in a movie: a loaded cast at the top of their game, a bitterly cynical view of the current global and human condition, twists/turns, a bold sense of visual style, and a dynamite script. It’s also bookended by extended dinner party scenes and clocks in at a crisp 93 minutes. Fire it up TONIGHT!

Vermiglio

• Grade: A-

• Thoughts: I was knocked out by this film. Beautifully shot, starkly and coldly observed, oscillating between tragedy and hope. It’s a very small and patiently told story of a single family in a single village removed from the close of WWII, facing both deathly and tiny stakes, and is just lovely.

The Mastermind

• Grade: A-

• Thoughts: Kelly Reichardt returns with another small and slow story of creative people frustrated by their circumstances, turning to potentially criminal means to achieve their goals, then facing the consequences. I was especially caught up with the dry sense of humor, the faded soft visuals, and another Josh O’Connor performance. He’s one of the best in the business right now with immaculate taste.

Indie/alternative sensibilities

Eephus

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: It’s more than the fact that I thought fondly of my old rec league kickball team while watching this; it’s more than the fact that this film has some of the most convincing – and convincingly slow and frustrating – depictions of baseball you might ever see; it’s that, like the men on the diamond, the world seems determined to pull time away from me.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: Sometimes you just need a sweet, thoughtful, quirky, gently touching charmer and this little gem delivers the goods.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: I’m very glad I sought this film out; it’s highly accessible for a Western audience despite being primarily about the cultural ritual of funerals in Zambia. What’s most profound, of course, is how those cultural rituals feel like an arm of a culture that protects evil rather than its victims.

Friendship

• Grade: B

• Thoughts: Gosh, I cracked up hard during this movie. Part cringe comedy extraordinaire; part surreal comic muse on middle age emasculation and the confusing intricacies of modern corporate manhood; part Tim Robinson showcase; 100% uniquely funny.

Misericordia

• Grade: B-

• Thoughts: There’s plenty of humor in this story, which unfolds like a shaggier version of The Talented Mr. Ripley but feels like a deliberate counter to everything enticing about that film. I wasn’t fully gripped, but I had a decent enough time.

Parthenope

• Grade: C-

• Thoughts: Paolo Sorrentino creates some of the most visually sumptuous and around, often in pursuit of celebrating beauty for its own sake. This film literalizes that idea, and critiques of that pursuit, very much to a fault with a bizarre and paper-thin melodramatic story that is chock full of dumb tropes and asinine plotting.

Closer to the mainstream

28 Years Later

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: I was as pleasantly surprised by this movie as anything I saw all year. Part post-apocalyptic adventure tale, but more coming-of-age story featuring a young man learning hard truths about his parents and coming to grips with their mortality in a way that’s as truly beautiful as the film is ridiculously gory; it’s really quite special.

Warfare

• Grade: B+

• Thoughts: Much was made of this film’s dedication to realism; not only is this a recreation of a specific firefight, it was co-written and co-directed by a former Navy SEAL who was present. This is palpable in the film, which is as technically well-crafted as anything else you’re likely to find, and though the film does subtly communicate ideas of war’s futility in its imagery and story beats, I ultimately found little else here to grab onto.

The Phoenician Scheme

• Grade: B

• Thoughts: That this film came and went with such little fanfare is yet more proof that we take Wes Anderson for granted. This is a really fun movie, appropriately touching, and anchored by an excellent performance from Benicio Del Toro, who’s become a key player in the Anderson troupe of late.

Mountainhead

• Grade: B-

• Thoughts: If you miss the tone and specifically literate corporatized non-speak used by the elites to thinly mask their foibles of Succession, boy do I have the thing for you. If you’re worried that this is just Succession karaoke, I couldn’t disagree more, but I agree about both work’s ability to meet the moment with aplomb.

Eddington

• Grade: B-

• Thoughts: Ari Aster delivered a blunt and brutal satire of life during COVID with all its loaded sociopolitical baggage right on front street. Not every idea lands, and once you get used to this film’s off-putting bleak dryness, you’ll realize there’s scant other tones at play. Massive props for running right at the moment, however.

Materialists

• Grade: C+

• Thoughts: Compared to her debut feature Past Lives, Celine Song’s follow up is very disappointing and outright bizarre; compared to the average romcom, it’s far more writerly (maybe to a fault), more visually impressive, and more intelligent in spurts. A win’s a win?

Highest 2 Lowest

• Grade: C

• Thoughts: Spike Lee? Remaking High and Low, one of the best films of all time? In NYC? Starring Denzel Washington? Count me in! Until that bafflingly poor first half, at least; the second half is where the film comes alive and almost makes up for the first’s faults. Almost.

Companion

• Grade: C

• Thoughts: There are some “C grade” films that are designed to be exactly that, and that’s fine; this is one such film. It’s a fun little movie with a couple of twists and turns, and you could do a lot worse.

Mickey 17

• Grade: C

• Thoughts: There are some other “C grade” films that are massive disappointments, and that’s what we’re looking at here. Overt and unfunny satire mixes with deliberately over-the-top simple messaging and slapstick humor to very few gains. Robert Pattinson isn’t just innocent here; he’s the best part of the film and legitimately good.

Honey, Don’t!

• Grade: C-

• Thoughts: I mostly enjoyed Ethan Coen’s previous junky lesbian crime comedy team-up with Margaret Qualley, but I didn’t really enjoy this one. Misbegotten from the start, the movie never really finds its tonal footing and doesn’t have a gripping enough mystery at its core. Maybe they’ll win me back with the next one.