As I sat in the relatively recently added second screening room of the Texas Theatre – the one created out of what was formerly the Texas’s balcony – I fretted about what I had gotten myself into. I was there to see one of the two** movies in existence that, until that hot day in mid-June of 2025, I had actively avoided. I had done so because both movies have rich and storied histories of being some of the most disturbing cinema ever created.
That night, the Texas was screening Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notoriously disgusting rumination on fascism and cruelty. I don’t need to add much in the way of plot description outside of providing the succinct synopsis found under Salò’s entry on Letterboxd: “Four corrupted fascist libertines round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of sadistic physical, mental and sexual torture.”
My decision to subject myself to these cinematic depravities was almost foiled before I could even buy a ticket. When I stepped up to the concessions stand/box office, I was informed that the show was sold out. I was disappointed/partly relieved. Luckily, the owner of the Texas, Barak Epstein, swooped in like a guardian angel to save the day. He informed the person who had tried to turn me away that they had, in the last few minutes, refunded a sold seat. I was good to go. I triumphantly shook my fist in the air and exaggeratedly exclaimed, “YEEEES!”
On the inside, I was making peace with reaching the point of no return.
I quietly, so as not to be overheard by anyone else standing in line, asked if I could have an empty popcorn bag, just in case. Salò is notorious for provoking retching, gagging, and vomiting from those screening it. I offered to pay the price of the popcorn that would have gone into the bag, but the employee gladly supplied one to me free of charge.
The screening was part of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, an annual weeklong festival programmed at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles. The organization describes the event on their website thusly:
“The American Cinematheque is thrilled to present a weeklong festival that spotlights some of the greatest films from around the world that explore the darkest sides of humanity, as well as some of the bleakest points in human history. A harrowing, yet powerful lineup of films defined by stark imagery, unimaginable tragedies, existential fear, nihilism and shocking acts of brutality, this series features the world’s leading filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.”
This year’s program, the fourth iteration of Bleak Week, took to the road, programming the offerings in seven cities and 10 venues across the US, as well as in London. As I related briefly in my coverage of the 2025 Oak Cliff Film Festival, which took place later that same month:
“When the presenter began his opening remarks, he asked what was wrong with us. We cheered in response. I was there for the overt linking of fascism to religion and an exploration of the depravity of those with too much money and power. It was an experience I’ll never forget. Also, fuck all Nazis.”
In case you’re wondering, I didn’t end up using that empty popcorn bag.
The Salò screening was a cinematic highlight of my 2025 movie year, and not only because I faced and slew what I had previously considered to be an unconquerable dragon. As I look back on the year that was 2025, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom will remain a stark and visceral fictional juxtaposition to what we only began to grasp last year as one of the most depraved real-life horrors of our modern age.
I’m describing the Epstein files (in which, I might add, our current president is heavily implicated) the ongoing scandal that threatens – if we can collectively find the fortitude to round up the offenders – to upend our society in fundamental ways. The stories of sexual assault and abuse against children (and, as we are only recently learning, outright torture and murder) perpetrated on Epstein Island, by elite members of the Epstein Class, sync up perfectly with the unspeakable acts depicted in Salò.
Yeah, the year 2025 was another tough one, you guys.
I can technically say I was wrong about my prediction of the last few years that each new year will go down as being the hottest on record because of human-made climate change. Last year was not, as I predicted, the hottest on record. It was the third hottest, behind 2024 (the hottest) and 2023. The only reason for this slightest of deviations from the pattern is down to the presence of the La Niña phenomenon, which helps to suppress global temperatures. We’ll see if the new year of 2026 gets us back on track to cook ourselves to death.
All of the above is a long-winded way of relating that I had real trouble finding solace or joy even in my beloved movies last year. There was joy to be had, to be sure, but it was fleeting and didn’t help my overall mental health much. I only published 27 pieces in 2025; by contrast, my usual goal is to put up one item each week. It was the least I’ve written on this website since I created it at the end of 2014. And most of those 27 posts were due to my film festival coverage.
I simply couldn’t bring myself to sit down and get the work done for the majority of the year. Rae asked me on more than one occasion if I was OK. I am not. Our society is collapsing. A paramilitary/secret police force by the name of ICE is outright shooting us in the streets now.
(I want to acknowledge the privilege of that last statement. Black and brown folks have been experiencing state-sanctioned violence since the inception of the nation; still, what’s currently happening under the vile Trump regime feels measurably different.)
But, because I’ve always tended to skew optimistic, I refuse to allow Trump’s fascistic attempted takeover of the US to get me down completely. I might publish less often, but I won’t stop publishing completely. Nor will I allow these Nazi fucks to steal all of my joy. As we saw last year with those brave souls willing to mock fascists to their faces with the help of inflatable frog costumes, joy is a vital weapon in the non-violent struggle against tyranny and authoritarian violence.
Nor will I allow myself to be intimidated into silence about what’s happening in and to this country. I pondered on multiple occasions last year if politics is flooding my film critiques, warping them into something other than true criticism. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t give a damn. I can’t do much. I’m one person with virtually no power or influence. But I can continue to use this tiny corner of the internet to say, again and again, that what is happening is not normal and that it is wrong.
Paul Thomas Anderson dropped yet another of his masterpieces last year to let me know I’m on the right track. Anderson’s incendiary, virtuosic One Battle After Another hit me like a lightning bolt both times that I screened it last year. It is political cinema at its most potent, while also masterfully managing tone to include a lot of laughs mixed with heartbreaking pathos.
So, it’s probably no surprise that One Battle After Another made my cut of the top ten films of 2025. I’ve made it a point since 2022 not to rank my top ten but instead to list them in the order in which I saw them. You can read more about my decision to do that here. While I’m going the much more satisfying (for me) route of effectively creating a “my year in cinema” list, rest assured that if I were to arrange my top ten in order of greatness, One Battle After Another would likely have topped the list. At this point, it looks like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agrees with me. PTA’s latest is currently a front runner to win Best Picture at the 2026 Oscars ceremony.
Before I get to my list, which is a top 25 of what inspired, thrilled, and mesmerized me most in cinema last year, I want to report a few of the highlights of my cinematic year by brief bullet point. This is what supplied joy in my life in terms of movies throughout last year:
I collaborated with my good friend Tim to embark on a continuing series, arranged by different themes, as a way to introduce each other to movies, or to catch up with blind spots for one or both of us. Last year, we tackled documentaries, single-location movies, and time loop movies. In 2026, we’re planning on formalizing a schedule to complete one series each quarter.
I was able to cover four film festivals – SXSW (possibly for the last time?), DIFF, OCFF, and ICFTX – in addition to visiting Chicago for the first time to attend Filmspotting Fest, the celebration of 20 years of one of the best film podcasts currently in operation. It was a delight to share this quick, three-day trip to what I consider film criticism Mecca with Rae.
While I’m on the subject of *in the voice of Borat* MY WIFE, I can’t fail to mention her amazing birthday gift to me last year. She arranged for me, my brother, and our good friend Rob to visit the Southern Methodist University (SMU) film vault, complete with a private guided tour.
I was also able to turn Rae on to the charms of The Best Years of Our Lives as part of our ongoing project to watch every Oscar Best Picture winner. (This was her idea, I promise!) Other highlights in my attempts to turn Rae into a rabid cinephile were her joyous reactions to Peter Jackson’s Braindead and our mutual discovery of a bonkers horror movie called Satan’s Cheerleaders, both watched during Hooptober.
My brother-from-the-same-mother and I got together for an Alamo Drafthouse screening of Popcorn, a goofy horror movie from the ‘90s with VHS cover art that endlessly intrigued me as a child.
Dogma was freed in 2025, and I got to see it on the big screen!
And finally, I got 30-or-so of my closest friends and associates together for a special, private screening celebrating my first decade as The Forgetful Film Critic. It was held at Alamo Drafthouse Cedars, and the movie was After Blue (Dirty Paradise). I’m pretty sure I melted some brains at that screening. That night was pretty much exactly what I wanted it to be.
Now, without further ado, let’s dig into my top 25 movies of 2025.
*Note: Each movie title above the picture is a link that will take you to my thoughts on that movie, with three exceptions.
The Spies Among Us
After the SXSW screening and Q&A for The Spies Among Us — a harrowing documentary about the terror campaign waged against East German citizens by the secret police, known as the Stasi, during the Cold War period — I ran into the subject of the film, Peter Keup, outside of the theater. The dancer-turned-journalist was thrown away in an East German prison camp after his own brother informed on Peter’s plan to escape to the West. I told Keup that I was afraid that what his country went through during the 1950s through the 1980s was slowly but inexorably happening here under the fascistic regime of Donald Trump. He looked me in the eye and sorrowfully told me that he suspected that I was correct. See this film, if for no other reason, to understand the stakes of what we’re currently experiencing.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
This is one movie making my top ten of 2025 that you can actually go see in a theater upon publication of the list. From Matt Johnson — director of my beloved BlackBerry — comes Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a hilarious riff on Johnson and costar Jay McCarrol’s web series from the late aughts. It played festivals throughout 2025 and was picked up by Neon, after premiering at SXSW 2025, where I saw it, before a theatrical rollout beginning just last week. All the two founders of Nirvanna the Band want in life is a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli music venue. When an absolutely insane plan to skydive from the 1800-foot-tall CN Tower as a gimmick to get booked at the Rivoli doesn’t go as planned, Matt accidentally creates a Back to the Future-style time machine when he spills his last bottle of Orbitz onto his flux capacitor. If that sounds completely ridiculous, wait until you see the shenanigans that come from these two guys once they travel back to the year 2008. Made on a two-million-dollar budget, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is endlessly inventive and constantly makes you wonder how they dun that. That bravura opening sequence at the CN Tower is hilarious and terrifying in equal measure.
André Is an Idiot
André Is an Idiot, a provocative documentary from first-time feature director Tony Benna, manages to walk the tightrope of broad, irreverent comedy and heartbreaking sadness. André — whose own mother calls him an idiot for his carelessness with his own health — wanted to create a portrait of himself dying of colon cancer as both a cautionary tale and as a way to celebrate his “nothing sacred” perspective on life. I saw a lot of myself in André, and I laughed heartily along with him as we see the ravaging effects that the cancer takes on his body. Bonus points go to Benna for the coup of casting Tommy Chong as André’s father, when it becomes apparent that the subject’s actual dad is too private of a person to sit for an interview.
Sinners
Sinners was one of the biggest casualties of my inability to get much writing done last year. As the true horrors of the Trump regime began to unfold in the first months of his second term in office, it all really started to take a toll on my mental health. At the same time, I started hearing things about this new Ryan Coogler film and how incredible it was. I couldn’t get it together enough to write a review, but I got my ass to an IMAX presentation of Sinners, then went back for a second helping at a traditional screening. Honestly, there’s not much I could add to the conversation about one of the biggest hits of 2025. I’ll only mention that, like the transcendent dance/music sequence in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock from 2020, the absolutely beguiling Afrofuturism music sequence in Coogler’s picture knocked me flat on my ass.
OBEX
I saw OBEX, a scrappy little independent feature from director Albert Birney, at my favorite scrappy little independent film festival, the Oak Cliff Film Festival, at the mid-year point. This black-and-white rumination on early computer game culture and finding human connection through it, is starkly beautiful and revels in a love of DIY effects and moody atmospheres. OBEX was picked up by Oscilloscope Laboratories and given a small theatrical release in January of 2026. The trippy aesthetics and ethereal world that Birney and director of photography Pete Ohs craft for the movie are dream-like and wonderous. Also, long live Sandy the dog!
Fucktoys
A sex worker, a dislodged tooth, and a curse. These are the core elements in Fucktoys, an incendiary and trippy everything-sploitation bit of anarchy from first-time feature director and star Annapurna Sriram. When she learns that she needs a thousand bucks to lift a curse put on her, Sriram’s AP goes on a bonkers quest to get the money before it’s too late. Fucktoys was a bit of a white whale for me in 2025. As regular readers will remember from my festival coverage last year, this film was one of my most anticipated screenings at SXSW 2025, but then I couldn’t get into any of the showings for it. Luckily, I was able to catch up with it at OCFF 2025, and it was absolutely worth the wait. If you like it when things get weird and raunchy, Fucktoys is for you.
Videoheaven
“If you want to walk around a video store for three hours RIGHT NOW, this is the movie for you.” These remarks were delivered to those of us gathered for the screening of Videoheaven from its director, Alex Ross Perry, transmitted via the screening’s presenter, director David Lowery, at OCFF 2025. That’s what Perry promised, and that’s what we got. Inspired by the book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store and narrated by Maya Hawke, Perry’s exhaustive and rigorous study of video rental stores, as portrayed on screen, is sure to be the final word on a business that created and shaped millions of film addicts. From shots of mom-and-pop rental stores in little seen outsider-art movies with a budget on par with what you would spend on an oil change, to blockbusters that include scenes inside a Blockbuster, Perry takes us on a tour of reel life, and I was only disappointed that it didn’t go on longer. Since seeing this last summer, I have obsessively checked for when Videoheaven might be available for streaming or as a physical media purchase. To date, I have been disappointed. When it is finally made available, I run the risk of watching it continuously forever.
One Battle After Another
Virtuoso filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson dropped a masterpiece last fall that somehow, despite source material written over three decades ago, perfectly captures the harrowing times in which we currently find ourselves. Featuring a paramilitary force that eerily resembles the fascistic real-world secret police force known as ICE, Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a harbinger of what’s around the corner for the US as well as a warning to stop it at all costs. It also contains a heaping helping of sardonic comedy and human connection in the form of the relationship between a father and daughter. For me, it’s all in that smash cut eliding 16 years of story time and swaddled in Steely Dan’s laid back Dirty Work. That and Benicio del Toro’s sensei, who is running a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” Viva la revolución!
It Was Just an Accident
The incendiary new film from acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident, led directly to the filmmaker’s conviction in his home country on charges of “propaganda activities” against the regime. The film’s meditation on the brutal torture by the regime of everyday citizens, and the lust for vengeance that it creates in its characters, makes for absolutely vital art that speaks truth to power. I recently heard that one of the most powerful things that a repressed people can do in the face of tyranny is to simply live as if they are free. Panahi makes art like he is free. An act like that is our only hope for true justice against repressive and violent dictatorships. That’s something that the US population might be learning a lot more about very soon.
One of Them Days
While this year’s list held a copious amount of laughs, One of Them Days is my out-and-out goofy comedy pick of the year. This movie is so goddamned funny. I laughed from the moment it started until the moment the credits rolled. Much of that is down to the stars. Keke Palmer plays Dreux, a waitress with aspirations for more in life, and SZA, in her big screen debut, is Alyssa, a hopeful artist who seems to make it her personal mission to trip Dreux up whenever possible. The two roomies and best friends embark on a bonkers race around LA when the pair run into money troubles on account of Alyssa’s less-than-upstanding boyfriend. Add in an inspired supporting turn from Katt Williams — “Heed was not taken!” — along with the rest of the supporting cast and freewheeling direction from Lawrence Lamont, with a hilarious script from Syreeta Singleton, and you might just have the Friday of the 2020s. Released in January of 2025, I took my good, sweet time getting to One of Them Days, but better late than never.
The rest of the best:
Here’s the rest of my top 25 of the year. As above, I have listed them in the order in which I saw them. I’m not going to comment on them at all. I’ll simply link to my reviews, where available. If any of them grab your attention, check ‘em out:
New Jack Fury
The Secret of Me
The Librarians
To Use a Mountain
Seeds
Eddington
Mickey 17
Weapons
Arco
Superman
Orwell: 2+2=5
Sentimental Value
Bugonia
The American Revolution
The Running Man
**Buy me a slice of pizza sometime, and I’ll tell you what the other one is.