Slag Magazine

By Dietz Woehle

2025 was a scary time to be alive on this planet, especially for LA residents. Starting with the horrific fires, continuing with ICE raids, and ending with flooding, nothing about 2025 was comforting, except for the movies. It was a shockingly good year for cinema, and in particular American cinema, as some of our best filmmakers rose to the moment and made some of the most entertaining reflections of our dark time. Some of these films have received near-universal acclaim, but I want to shine an extra spotlight on the more controversial or underseen gems of last year. These were the 20 best films of 2025.

1. One Battle After Another

2. Marty Supreme

3. The Mastermind

Kelly Reichardt is the cilantro of American masters. Depending on your biological design, her films are either eye-opening experiences or fast-acting Nyquil. Her latest is no exception. The Mastermind follows JB Mooney, played by the always brilliant Josh O’Connor, a 1970s stay-at-home dad who plans a simple art heist. Things go according to plan, but the plan isn’t very good. 

Reichardt’s film is patient and lets the audience sit with a main character who doesn’t have a lot going on, both externally and internally. However, for those who can get on her wavelength, The Mastermind is funny, suspenseful, and oddly heartbreaking. An extended sequence involving a barn and ladder will either make you check your watch or fall out of your chair laughing at O’Connor’s quiet buffoonery. The film has so much compassion for JB, despite him not earning any of it. He is selfish and lazy, but O’Connor plays him without an ounce of cynicism. He’s just a dumb guy who got in way over his head. Most heist movies would slowly reveal the grand plan, but as The Mastermind slowly unravels, JB’s plan reveals itself to be thinner than initially thought. As usual, Reichardt finds so much detail in the quiet spaces between events and crafts a scathing critique of masculinity and ego.

4. Hamnet

5. If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You

6. Mickey 17

It’s easy to forget that it was 2025 when Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho followed up his smash hit Parasite with a big-budget, English-language, sci-fi epic. Dumped at the start of the year and met with little more than a shrug, Mickey 17 was the big movie that couldn’t, and has already been mostly forgotten. It’s hard to envision a world where Mickey 17 was a crossover hit with audiences, but director Bong’s bizarre satire was certainly not given a fair shake. 

Set in the not-too-distant future, Robert Pattinson stars as Mickey, a down-on-his-luck and admittedly dim man, who enlists to help humanity colonize a new world. Mickey becomes an “expendable”, someone who can die and be regenerated, to do all the work no other human would want to do. The film is brash, big, loud, and not at all subtle about its political commentary. Mark Ruffalo, in particular, goes cartoonish in his mash-up of Trump and Elon Musk as the movie’s villain. However, after a full year of Trump 2.0, Mickey 17’s satire doesn’t feel too loud and obvious, but rather apt and pretty funny. The real heart of the movie lies in Pattinson’s performance as the various Mickeys. While many loud satires of current America look down on the everyday man, Bong feels such sympathy for those who find themselves in the middle of a capitalist hell. Mickey is a lover who is asked to die for no good reason at all, and Pattinson makes every Mickey feel like a full person. Perhaps the most unfairly overshadowed movie of the year, Mickey 17 will hopefully find the audience it deserved at the time.

7. Superman

8. Sinners

9. Sentimental Value

10. Sorry, Baby

11. 28 Years Later

12. Avatar: Fire and Ash

It feels silly to defend James Cameron’s Avatar saga. These are some of  the highest-grossing films of all time. They’re technical marvels loved by the masses, yet it still feels they get brushed off. Fire and Ash, in particular, has been accused of repeating beats from the other films, but Cameron’s latest chapter goes much deeper than you imagine. Picking up immediately after the events of Avatar: The Way of Water, Jake Sully and his family must deal with the loss of their eldest son, as their war against the humans grows more intense. 

Knowing the audience buys the Na’vi as characters, Cameron takes our disbelief to the next step, asking us to sit in silence with them and mourn with them. The effects and motion capture have never looked better, but the film is less showy than the previous two. The most awe-inspiring effects of the year are put to use to show a mother accept her adopted son for the first time, and for an absentee father to hand his kid a burger. Cameron also gets stranger with his world-building. Fire and Ash brings mysticism and faith to the forefront. Ewya, the goddess of Pandora, is a full-on character in this film, and the narrative tension is held on the belief of a higher power. The film is full of ideas that could only come from the head of someone who did a little too much LSD in the late 60s, but that’s what keeps these movies fresh compared to so many other blockbusters. 

13. Ella McCay

There’s a slim chance you saw James L. Brooks’ latest dramedy, and an even slimmer chance that you liked it, but not only is Ella McCay the legendary director’s best film in 30 years, it’s exactly the kind of film we need more of. It opens with the titular character opening a dictionary and reading the definition of the word “trauma” to her younger brother, warning him that an injury to the brain must be avoided at all costs. 

Flash forward a few decades, and Ella is about to be named governor of the unnamed state she was born and raised in. Over the course of three days, she must balance her new responsibilities, years’ worth of family drama, a collapsing marriage, and her idealism that goes against her party’s do-nothing attitude. Through two hours of witty dialogue, Brooks delivers both an achingly sincere and wildly out-of-touch movie about political red tape and the necessity of kindness. Through various injuries to the brain, Ella learns that her trauma is not only unavoidable, but necessary to get her goals accomplished. The fittingly named Emma Mackey shines as Ella, while old pros like Albert Brooks and Jamie Lee Curtis turn in some of their best work in years. Ella McCay (the film and the character) is a lot like Brooks’ other female invention, Lisa Simpson. Overly sincere, well-intentioned, annoying to some, but somehow unforgettable and heartwarming.

14. No Other Choice

15. The Phoenician Scheme

16. Eddington

17. Weapons

18. Friendship

19. Blue Moon

20. Honey Don’t

It is a pattern that the sillier Coen Brothers films are released to a tepid response,  only later reclaimed as masterpieces. The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? have grown in reputation since their initial release. However, Ethan Coen’s last two collaborations with his wife Tricia Cooke have not just been met with shrugs, but outright hostility. With the Coens split up, Ethan has gone all in on his sillier instincts and his wife’s stories about lesbians and violence. 2024’s Drive Away Dolls was a 90-minute romp and is about as goofy as they come, but their newest film, Honey Don’t, is much more in line with Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel. The film is darker, slower, and has a purposely unsatisfying ending, but it is still filled with witty dialogue and a sobering look at an underrepresented part of America. 

Margaret Qualley stars as Honey, a lesbian private dick, who must solve the mystery of several missing girls in the seedy nothingness of Bakersfield, California. Coen and Cooke shoot Bakersfield like the fifth circle of hell, poking fun at the systems that keep women impoverished and dependent. At first glance, Honey Don’t comes off as messy and unfocused, but like The Big Lebowski, the layers of comedy and subtext slowly reveal themselves on repeat watches. While some beg for the Coens to reunite, this separation period has produced some of their most revealing and interesting work. Honey Don’t is not among the best of Ethan’s filmography, but the world is a better place for having a strange little film like this in it, and Ethan is a better director for making it.

This story appears in the Winter 2026 Edition of Slag Magazine