The 2025 Cool Movie Awards

Unsurprisingly and sympathetically, everyone’s in a rush to move beyond 2025 and into 2026, even though 2026 has bore an uncanny resemblance to the start of 2025. So it goes. Anxious as people are for the future to get here, there’s something to be said for reflecting on the past a smidge longer than necessary. In film journalism especially, the urge to catalogue the best cinema in a single release year is more like a compulsion, and the compulsion doesn’t do the movies any favors. So, as the Oscars make their final preparations for this year’s ceremony (Sunday, March 15), we here at Cool Material think the time’s right to publish our own take on the best 2025 had to offer on big screens. (And, sure, smaller ones, for those who love their streaming.)

In 1990, George Carlin roped Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd into a joke about sexual assault for his TV special Doin’ It Again; the comic legend’s basic conceit here wasn’t so much that sexual assault is funny, because it isn’t, but that unsavory humor about sensitive matters works when laced with absurdism. Likewise, in Eva Victor’s extraordinary Sorry, Baby, sexual assault isn’t a laughing matter, but laughter nonetheless is to be had in the moments exterior to the assault. When Victor chooses, their script leans hard into gags and one-liners fit to leave the viewer’s sides a-splitting. Conversely, they let the film hold still when it must, and we can only squirm uncomfortably in our seats or feel our hearts bleed for the lead, Agnes (played by Victor, as clear a triple threat as possible), who has a bad thing happen to her, referred to in chapter headers quite literally as “the bad thing,” and who soldiers forward while keeping the thing under a lid. The tightrope Victor walks here is the sort far more established filmmakers traditionally plummet from. (See: Luca Guadagnino’s dross After the Hunt.) But they’re a natural funambulist, and they make the journey look effortless.

You can refer to Merriam-Webster for the dictionary definition of “catharsis,” or you can watch Zach Cregger’s sophomore horror film and experience catharsis for yourself. The academic choice is obvious, but the aesthetic choice is superior. No 2025 movie better fosters the sort of righteous satisfaction one gets from seeing bad people get what they deserve than Weapons, a rich and complex “whatsit” open to endless interpretations, but which is, at its core, an expression of Cregger’s grief for the loss of his friend and fellow The Whitest Kids U’ Know creator, Trevor Moore—a layer that adds even more complexity to the film’s gonzo plot. Gun culture, school shootings, our current era of disinformation and citizen “journalism,” and the parasitic influence of elder generations on the young all seem to be in effect in Weapons’ gore-slicked stew of neuroses and paranoia, but on top of all that, it’s absolutely hysterical, right up to the moment where rousing comeuppance is inflicted on Cregger’s wicked antagonist.

If KPop Demon Hunters’ popularity and cultural significance was symptomatic of its aesthetic worth, then that movie would be a shoe-in for every awards ceremony where animation is recognized. (Note: there’s basically no way at this point that the Academy Awards won’t pass it the Oscar at this year’s ceremony.) But there’s another 2025 Netflix film likewise steeped in Korea’s traditions, geography, and culture, Han Ji-won’s Lost in Starlight, and for reasons nobody will either deduce or even appreciate, it’s stayed under the radar for the whole year. And it’s a future masterpiece. Nan-young (Kim Tae-ri) is an aspiring astronaut; Jay (Hong Kyung) is an aspiring musician. By chance they bump into one another, literally, and in accordance with rom-com guidelines, they fall in love. Love’s reach, of course, is limited by Earth’s exosphere, so when Nan-young hops aboard for a mission to Mars, her and Jay’s infatuation is put to a galactic test. Lost in Starlight hits its romantic notes hard; it isn’t maudlin or saccharine, but instead painful, as great loves tend to be, and Han finds intense beauty in that pain—abetted by the most meticulously curated animation the movies produced all year long.

From her rise-and-fall as Hollywood’s early 2010s “it” girl and entertainment journalists’ parasocial bestie, to her recision from acting in response to both the rampant wave of gossipmongering about her character at the end of the decade, as well as her newfound motherhood, Lawrence has been on a rollercoaster for far too long. Die My Love, director Lynne Ramsay’s latest soft surrealist exploration of feminine psyche, is where she finally gets off. As Grace, a former novelist and newly suffering wife to her shiftless husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), Lawrence sours and curdles at turns, then erupts as a volcano in others. She is sexual. She is savage. She is dissatisfied, disaffected, and done caring if anyone else cares that she behaves unladylike, or unmotherly, or anything in her identity’s Venn Diagram imposed on her by others rather than by her own choice. It’s hard to say how much of her performance serves dual function as an exorcism, but it is easy to say she hasn’t been as good in years as she is under Ramsay’s guidance.

David Yow, on the other hand, is always David Yow, no matter what movies he appears in or whether he’s playing on stage with The Jesus Lizard. There’s no such thing as a “Yow” movie the way there’s such thing as a “Lawrence” movie; people aren’t buying tickets for his projects on his account. But Joshua Erkman’s update on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho makes a great case that perhaps people should pay to see Yow act more often, because he’s everything here that Oscar pundits prize during awards season, most of all “soulful.” In A Desert, Yow plays Harold Palladino, a disgraced detective searching for Alex Clark (Kai Lennox), a photographer gone missing in Yucca Valley, on behalf of his frantic wife Sam (Sarah Lind). As Psycho does to Janet Leigh, so A Desert does to Lennox before its halfway mark. Assisted by Lind, Yow carries the baton over the finish line, fusing shame with guilt with world-weariness with earnest, wistful compassion—a flawed gumshoe for this fleeting era of American life.

Horror cinema is positively stuffed with middle road demonic possession movies where the protagonist is neither helpless nor hapless, and instead plainly useless. They flail and flounder; then bam, the demon gets ‘em like clockwork. In an alternate universe, Ben Leonberg’s first feature, Good Boy, adopts that structure and ends up a forgettable addition to it’s niche’s canon. In our universe, the viewer’s POV character is Indy, a dog, whose owner makes the utterly foolish decision to move into his late grandpa’s (Larry Fessenden) remote cabin, while he faces a terminal illness. Slowly and cruelly, infernal corruption takes over the man; all Indy can do is bear witness. (Or dog witness.) Quietly, humbly, and to great effect, Good Boy exemplifies the spirit of horror as a genre: ingenuity, the key to taking a threadbare formula and giving it fresh validation.

Rather than a “making of” or “behind the scenes” venture, loaded with tidbits about Tobe Hooper’s unassailable masterpiece of 1970s American independent cinema, Alexandre O. Philippe invited five guests (Patton Oswalt, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Takeshi Miike, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama) to perform film criticism. Chain Reactions is an ode to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, undoubtedly, a full-throated endorsement of a film that’s as much a shock to the system now as it was in in 1974. It’s a movie about the movie, jammed with engrossing insights into Hooper’s disfigured portrait of the American dream. Especially, though, it’s a clean demonstration of how to engage with movies, and for that matter all art forms. By wrestling with and personalizing them. We learn, for instance, about Heller-Nicholas’ relationship to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through her reflections on her childhood, and we realize that Miike may never have gone on to become an agitator in 1990s Japanese filmmaking sans the inspiration he derived from Hooper. Philippe and his guests’ collective contributions put The Texas Chain Saw Massacre into the fullest macro-context possible. Years from now, maybe we’ll think of Chain Reactions as valuable to the same extent we think of its subject.

Nobody makes movies like Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho. There’s a temptation to see historical efforts at quashing his productions, a’la the successful 2016 ploy to forestall the selection of his film Aquarius as the country’s Oscars envoy and last year’s fumbled attempt to do the same with The Secret Agent, as acts of ignorance: such is Mendonça Filho’s genius, and such is his opposition’s guilelessness, that they just can’t suffer him to win. The reality is that life imitates art for Mendonça Filho, a man who makes movies in the spirit of flight. At any given moment in much of his work, there’s a yearning on the other side of the lens to pull focus from his subject to an ancillary character instead, as if Mendonça Filho wishes he could tell their story too. Luckily, the man has restraint. In the case of The Secret Agent, he also has cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova, whose patience keeps pace with his restlessness as a narrator. Through her eyes, The Secret Agent moves and is shot with calculation. She gives Mendonça Filho the greatest gift for a filmmaker like him. Time. A key component for unfolding the movie’s plot.

A filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) without a single talented cell in his body is hired to make a modern-day movie adaptation of the Dracula myth. Acknowledging that he sucks at his profession, he turns to an AI program to make the movie for him, and ends up churning out a handful of movies instead. Radu Jude is perhaps the last person on Earth anyone would expect to incorporate GenAI into one of his movies. Though at the same time he’s also the first person on Earth who deserves the leeway to do so. He is our great cultural observer and critic, an artist capable of not only seeing the ways in which the disparate platforms of contemporary life worsen living, but the ways in which those platforms intersect with one another. Ugly as the AI images in Dracula are (and make no mistake, they’re hideous) they serve a purpose, making both expected and unexpected points about the impact of GenAI in markets and regions great and small. This isn’t so much a film about what we lose when anyone can make art with the push of a button. Rather, it’s a film about how already lost societies make fertile ground for technology like AI. (And, of course, copious dick jokes.)

What has fast become 2025’s de facto “best picture” is at once the least likely on paper to succeed. A paranoiac action thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio in his Dude Lebowski era, or perhaps his Jack Nicholson era, but undoubtedly in his “loser burnout” era, where clamoring revolutionary politics collide with humbler ones, and where space is saved for a black woman struggling to reconcile the divide between militant radical activism and motherhood. How many studio films, even the ones made by auteurs like Paul Thomas Anderson, enjoy the freedom to name a major character Perfidia Beverly Hills? The fact of One Battle After Another’s existence feels like a miracle, if not for its naked contempt for white supremacists and the levers of power they cling to, then for the audaciousness of according grace to Teyana Taylor’s conflicted agitator and sparing none for DiCaprio’s bug-eyed, squirrely has-been. 2025 was a year for inept white male heroes. In One Battle After Another, the ineptitude is a critique and an endearment at the same time. It isn’t up to DiCaprio to save the day. All he can do is bear witness while Chase Infiniti, playing his character’s free-spirited teen daughter, does the saving. If that’s not miraculous to some, then Anderson’s capacity for filmmaking so engrossing as to make three hours pass by like half that amount should convince the doubters.