The Best of 2025

The best films of 2025

Rian Johnson is one of the best American filmmakers working today. His filmography – packed with influences ranging from Dashiell Hammett to Robert Altman, Agatha Christie, Terry Gilliam, and Katsuhiro Otomo – is as eclectic as it is rich in theme and character.

After revitalizing sci-fi with Looper and crafting one of the best Star Wars films in the franchise, Johnson scaled back and returned to his love of murder mysteries with the Benoit Blanc series. The first one, Knives Out, was a roaring success, and practically single-handedly returned the genre into the spotlight. Glass Onion, its follow-up, switched gears again, echoing more The Last of the Sheila than it did Christie.

Now, with Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson has dug even deeper into the plentiful mines of the genre, all the way into the days of Edgar Allan Poe. Along the way, he has picked up some classic Southern Gothic for good measure.

Train Dreams is about a small life that is as grand and poetic as any epic. Its closest relatives are the quiet melancholy of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the timeless beauty of A River Runs Through it.

All three share the same longing of something grander than the past. They yearn to undersand the nature of the world and the elusiveness of time. We are on this planet for too short a moment to grasp anything but a sliver, and by the time we do that, it's already too late.

Joel Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a lumberjack who works the thick, seemingly endless forests of the country at the turn of the century. He meets and falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones), they wed, build a home, and have a daughter.

Early in the film, Grainier is unable to stop an act of senseless violence, and the specter of it haunts him for decades to come. Edgerton communicates his grief and anger with long, silent stares into the vastness of this world. He's the kind of actor who can say everything with small gesture. By the end, we can sense when he's happy, sad, or simply bemused by the wonders and astonishments in this life.

The episodic nature of the story unfolds at an unhurried, lyrical pace. There are barely any indicators to how much time has passed between events, and we don't need to them, either. This is a film about islands in time, not the currents leading up to them.

Some films only get better the longer you stay with them. The Testament of Ann Lee is one of those movies. I saw it a little over a week ago and haven't stopped thinking about it since. It is dense and beautiful, anchored by a career-best performance by Amanda Seyfried, and it will be one of the best films of the year when it releases.

Seyfried plays the titular Ann Lee, one of the founders of the Shakerism movement, which today has only three members to its name. Extreme in their beliefs to an extent, the Shakers were a movement of Christians hailing from England, who arrived in America in the late 1700s. They believed in celibacy, egalitarianism, and pacifism. Their world was a utopian community, where everyone lived in perceived harmony.

At least, that's what the brochure would tell us. In writer/director Mona Fastvold's vision, history is never that neat. Instead, it's as messy and beautiful as the people, and Fastvold never judges or editorializes her subjects. This is as empathetic as a would-be biopic can be, a kind of God's eye view of a past we can't fully understand.

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In England, Anne Lee lives a life of squalor with her brother. They are as devoted to one another as they are to God, who never seems to answer their prayers of a better life. Preachers on the street proclaim God is in man, not woman, and the world is built with a power structure in mind.

Anne Lee has four children, all of whom die. Something shifts inside of her. She finds the spiritual in celibacy, in reaching out with spiritual and emotional love in place of the physical. Soon, others flock to her. They are also broken in their way, and it is Anne Lee who helps them heal.

When England proves too small for their dreams, Anne Lee and her flock head to America, where the promise of freedom awaits. But those preaching equality and peace are quickly seen as a threat, and Anne Lee's odd, if sincere, declarations of a better world are met with violence.

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