MovieJawn’s Favorite Movies of the Year — Moviejawn

Kate Beach:

This year, I fell in love with vampires, mothers, cult members, gay artists, thieves, and priests, and only three of them were played by Josh O’Connor. I started my Best of 2025 list in April, when I fell in love with Sinnersand this list represents a long year of moviegoing. While I loved my share of big studio movies, I wanted to highlight some truly great indie films that deserve to be seen by as many people as possible. I felt so inspired this year by movies like So Fades the Lighta devastating cult thriller, and Eephusa lovely existential baseball story. No matter how bleak things seem or how many billions corporations spend to gobble each other up, there is so much out there waiting for us. Every year is a great year to go to the movies.

1. Peter Hujar’s Day

2. The Testament of Ann Lee

3. Sinners

4. Blue Moon

5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

6. So Fades the Light

7. Eephus

8. The Mastermind

9. Wake Up Dead Man

10. Sorry, Baby

11. Lurker

12. Hamnet

13. The Phoenician Scheme

14. The Ballad of Wallis Island

15. The History of Sound

Harper Rochel Goldman:

I have some rules when it comes to my year-end retrospectives. Generally, I don’t like doing them until the year is out, or until I’ve seen all my highly-anticipated films. So this list, while made with the utmost care, is far from final. I still haven’t seen Ann Lee, Dust Bunny, Marty Supremeor a dozen-or-so other heavy hitters. Consider this ranking a sort of time capsule for my feelings at the moment it was written (December 19th). You can even think of it as an exclusive preview of my final year-end list (which you’ll find on my Substack in January), a special sneak peek for the MovieJawn community. How were the movies this year? Good, as always.

1. 28 Years Later

2. Resurrection

3. Caught by the Tides

4. Sinners

5. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

6. Eddington

7. O’Dessa

8. Hard Truths

9. The Toxic Avenger

10. Dracula

Sankeerthna Vedamtam:

2025 brought me so much movie-related joy that I could never have imagined this time last year. Becoming a writer and critic was a world I thought was totally blocked off to me and this inaugural year at MovieJawn has proven me incredibly, wonderfully wrong. My best discoveries of the year were a mixture of happy accidents, review assignments that got under my skin, and some releases I was lucky enough to see in theatres. These top films also represent so much diversity in style, genre, storytelling methods, language that I was able to discover and educate myself about across the year.