Boomer’s Top 20 Films of 2025

/ swampflix

It’s that time of year again! This is the tenth time I’ve made one of these and I finally got started at a reasonable time. 

I’m not including documentaries in the main list of best films of the year this year, since I’m not even sure how one would compartmentalize ranking some of this year’s most serious topics in a countdown alongside something like The Naked Gun, so I won’t try. The best documentaries that I saw this year, in no particular order: 

  • Secret Mall Apartment – A surprisingly moving story about a cadre of art students whose statement about the need for gentrifying forces to occupy all public space turned into something more. Finding a void in the facade of a shopping mall, these young RISD co-eds and their mentor install an almost functional apartment within it, documenting the entire process on 2000s era video tech. It’s about ephemerality in art and in life, and works surprisingly well. Read my review here.
  • Ernest Cole: Lost and Found – This film is many things: an international mystery, an epistolary elegy, a warning that the past and the present are always the same. Last but not least, it is a portrait. From my review: “This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel.”
  • No Other Land – You already know why. Read my review here.

Honorable mentions

20. Companion

It feels like it’s been ages since Companion was being advertised based on its connection to Zach Cregger (via his production credit), given that the rest of the year was dominated by Weapons, his follow up to Barbarian from a few years ago. This film finds Sophie Thatcher’s Iris in what seems at first to be the enviable position of Josh (Jack Quaid)’s girlfriend, but we learn fairly quickly that this is not a place anyone would want to be. The two of them join his friends at a remote lakehouse, and when she kills the host in self-defense after he attempts to force himself on her, she learns that there’s more to herself and to her situation than meets the eye. If you managed to avoid the marketing for this film that spoiled the first act twist, just trust me on this one and go in with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you’ve already seen it or already been spoiled, read my review here.

19. Sister Midnight

A not-quite-vampire story about a woman in an arranged marriage who slowly loses her sanity and seems to take on a curse when she kills an insect at a wedding. Is she mad? Is she a goddess reborn? Is she both? Listen to Brandon and I discuss Sister Midnight here.

18. 28 Years Later

The long awaited sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s iconoclastic early aughts zombie film, 28 Years Later follows the life of a young boy named Spike coming of age in a small community that is insulated from the effects of the Rage virus and those contaminated by it due to its inaccessibility other than a land bridge that emerges at low time and is easily defensible. He accompanies his father to the larger islands on a foraging expedition and faces off against the Rage mutants living there; he returns changed and is further disillusioned about adults and their lies, enough so that he secrets his mother across the land bridge in the middle of the night in the hopes of finding her medical assistance from a supposed doctor on the “mainland.” A breakout performance for young actor Alfie Williams and a stellar turn from Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, who plays his mother. Read my review here. 

17. The Long Walk

Fifty boys, one from each state, participate in a televised competition in which they must maintain a speed of three miles per hour or die, with the understanding that there will only be one victor, who gets whatever they want. Based on a Stephen King novel inspired by nightly newscasts about the Vietnam War, The Long Walk as a text both preceded (and possibly inspired) many dystopian YA franchises and pre-emptively deconstructed them, showing the real, brutal effects of the regime without ever making our protagonists feel heroically defiant in the face of all odds. Not fun, but quite good. Read my review here. 

16. Rabbit Trap

In the future, I may chalk this one up to little more than recency bias, but I’ve meditated on this one every day since I first saw it. A movie that evokes an otherworld through electronic distortion of natural sounds, Rabbit Trap is more about evoking a sonic, psychedelic experience than delivering a narrative that ties up all of its loose ends, and is all the better for it. Read my review here. 

15. Boys Go to Jupiter

A very cute, very fun movie that captures both the listless ennui of unoccupied time between school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Read Brandon’s review here.

14. Lurker

“What’s the difference between love and obsession?” Oliver sings in one of the film’s breathy, whispery, but catchy (I’ll admit it) tracks. “I don’t know but I know I want you.” It’s a pretty explicit recitation of the question that drives the film. Oliver is a pop musician, Matthew is an obsessed fan. Or he might just be in love with Oliver. Or is he in love with the idea of Oliver? Perhaps he’s obsessed with the idea of what attaching himself to Oliver’s rising star can do for him, and love’s not even part of the equation, with Oliver himself only a means to an end. Lurker never comes right out and says which, if any, of these things are true; my interpretation is that Matthew is in love with Oliver, and his obsession builds from his overinvestment in Oliver’s casual intimacy and the fear of “losing” him, with all of his contributions to Oliver’s career merely the means by which he secures a place for himself in Oliver’s life. To me, Lurker is a love story, albeit one that’s also a cautionary tale for both the yearner and the object of adoration, while also being a story about what it’s like when the person who knows you best is the one you hate the most. Read my review here. 

13. Wake Up Dead Man

Rian Johnson once again delivers a pitch-perfect presentation of our favorite gentleman detective, Benoit Blanc, even if he takes the back seat more here than in either of his previous two outings. The man we spend the most time with is young Reverend Jud, a former boxer who found an ongoing path to redemption in faith after killing a man in the ring, and whose quasi-punishment for an altercation in his home parish is reassignment to a church that is literally, metaphorically, and in every meaningful way without Christ. Alongside my number five, this is one of the only pieces of Christian propaganda (even if only accidentally) to feel genuine and alive in recent (and even not-so-recent) memory. Read my review here. 

12. No Other Choice

Park Chan-Wook returns with another genre-bending spectacle about someone driven too far. Park is a director who knows how to navigate a revenge story, whether it be Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and even Decision to Leave, but unlike the mysterious but ultimately human characters upon whom Park’s protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) enact their vengeance, lead character Man Su of No Other Choice can’t fight the thing that has wronged him. You can’t take your revenge on a system; you can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure lay-offs out to an abandoned school to be tortured, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. Bereft of a valid vessel into which he can pour all of his failures and furies, Man Su finds a man who convinces himself that he has no other choice than to kill his fellow applicants, who are not really his enemies. In the weeks since I wrote my review, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphorical relevance of Man Su’s tooth, an ailment that he ultimately remedies by pulling out the damned thing, taking the healthy parts of the tooth out with the rot, and how that relates to his “removal” of his obstacles, both innocent and not. Good stuff; read my review here. 

11. Eephus

In his review, Brandon told what felt like a universally familiar story about a grandfather whose frequent (or even constant) viewership of televised broadcasts of America’s pastime makes it feel like one long baseball game playing out over decades. Eephus effectively captures that feeling, but my connection to baseball is a little different, as the first thing that comes to mind are the multiple summers in which I, miserable, was forced to play little league. Baseball is a forgiving sport, by which I mean that it’s not terribly fast paced, making it an acceptable sport for me, a boy with asthma, to play. What this also means is that it’s also a very boring sport, and every Saturday of my childhood and adolescence that I didn’t have to get up early and do yard labor, I was being dragged out of bed to go stand in an outfield in a BREC park somewhere, all of which in the mid-nineties looked like the field in which the entirety of this film takes place. Here, that slowness is the point; the film takes its title from a curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if it’s standing still. The game that we see played out takes an impossibly long time, nine innings stretched out from the dewy dawn hours until so late in the night that the players have to pull their cars onto the field and use their headlamps to play, the eephus hovering in the air as no one really wants this last game to end. Truly special stuff, and funny as hell. 

10. Twinless

Director/writer/star James Sweeney’s sophomore feature, a film about two very different men with distinct backgrounds, incompatible sexualities, and contrasting personalities who meet in a support group because of the one thing that they share: the loss of a twin. Dylan O’Brien is fantastic as both Roman and Rocky in one of the best performances of the year, and Sweeney is effectively sympathetic even as his behavior becomes unjustifiable and his secrets reveal a deeply unwell man. Read my review here. 

9. Bugonia

Perhaps the greatest and most worthwhile example of a Western remake of an Asian film. The differences from the South Korean original range from significant to almost imperceptible, but the film more than justifies its existence, and features another stellar turn from director Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm. Superb. Read my review here. 

8. The Naked Gun

This is the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, and one that I’ve revisited (as well as its inspiration) in the months since, despite my annual personal Q4 goal of cramming in as many unwatched new releases as I can gorge myself on. Liam Neeson is the perfect person to take on the role of Frank Derbin, Jr., and pairing him with nineties heartthrob Pamela Anderson feels almost like a no-brainer. Featuring more sight gags than all the comedies I saw in 2024 combined and a scene in which Anderson scats for her life, by far the funniest film sequence of the entire year was Frank and his new girlfriend going on a wintry romantic vacation that involves bringing a snowman to life (and then ending that life when their creation becomes unmanageable). It’s no surprise that I love this one, given that it was directed by Akiva Schaffer, and I’ve long been a vocal defender of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and co-written by Dan Gregor, who did fine work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. To whomever decided to make the villain’s defeat just like Jonathan’s in the sixth season of Buffy and deliberately stated earlier in the film that knowledge of the slayer and her pals was important to get all the references, my great thanks. Read Brandon’s review here. 

7. Reflection in a Dead Diamond

I’ve been remiss in not checking out previous films from the married writing/directing duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, other than a screening of Amer that I attended years ago that was filled with distractions that kept me from fully engaging with the experience. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, a phantasmagorical journey into the psyche of elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi). The film finds Diman staying at a coastal hotel in an area that he visited years before, although it’s unclear if he did so as a James Bond-esque superspy or merely as an actor who played one. The film opens on a scene that virtually recreates the end of For Your Eyes Only, and we’re given no reason to believe that Diman’s recollections of his days in espionage are meant to be anything other than his memories, but ambiguity enters the picture around the midpoint. Diman’s enemies include a group of opposing agents with themed names: Atomik (who glows), Amphibik (whose gag is scuba diving), and of course the sexy love interest Serpentik, who mostly does Catwoman-esque violence but has a ring that she can use to poison her foes like a cobra. One of these is Hypnotik, whose schtick is that he can make you believe that you’re in a film; in his present day, Diman is repeatedly given clues that his recollected misadventures are nothing more than a misrememberance of a role he once played, but it’s unclear if this is the degradation of a man’s mind in old age or all part of Hypnotik’s suggestion. Stylized, beautifully shot, frequently quite violent, and unforgiving, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the best Bond film of the twenty-first century. Read Brandon’s review here. 

6. Sinners

What else is there to say about Sinners? The initial advertising for the film left me cold, but Brandon texted me and let me know that this would be very much up my alley. And he was right! The film has been covered to hell and back by much more interesting and well-read writers than I am, but if you’re looking for something interesting to fill your time, I highly recommend this YouTuber’s video essay about the relationship between Irish folk and Black American music; it’s good stuff. Hear the primary podcast crew discuss the film here.

5. The Colors Within

Ever since I caught this one so that we could engage with it in conversation with the director’s earlier film Liz and the Blue Bird for one of our recent podcasts, I haven’t been able to stop singing its praises, recommending it to everyone that I’ve talked to about my favorite films of the year. Maybe there’s some recency bias there, but there’s also a recurring theme this year that a lot of my favorite movies; this one, my number one, Eephus, Sister Midnight, and Boys Go to Jupiter are films that have no real antagonist. Even within those, however, there is an external force that has created the situation in which our characters find themselves, respectively inconvenient construction, arranged marriages, and capitalism-inscribed gig economy woes. The Colors Within doesn’t even have those kinds of systemic threats at play; it’s just the story of a lonely girl with such pronounced synesthesia that she can see music and perceive people’s auras, who then makes friends with a cool upperclassman who plays guitar and forms a band with another lonely kid. Brandon sold this one to me as being similar to Linda Linda Linda, a film that I loved, and while there’s no doubt in my mind that the earlier live action film was an influence on this one, Linda featured our main characters under a time crunch to learn and play three songs by the end of the week for their school festival. In Colors, the kids in this band are just kind of puttering around and getting to know each other for most of the runtime; by the time one of the nuns at the girls’ school recommends that their band play the Valentine’s festival, you’re ready to simply accept that as where the story was always going, and it’s nice that the film gives the audience and the characters so much room to breathe and let the characters do the work rather than have them driven toward a goal from the start. An animated film that justifies its medium with its psychedelic sequences, this is a (soft, quiet, cozy) blast. Read Brandon’s review here. 

4. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

This year, while visiting with family in the Carolinas, one of my relatives mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before my maternal grandmother passed away, and that they would be going back to Louisiana when this happened. At present, my father and I are not on speaking terms, and I don’t expect that to change in this lifetime, and I knew this conversation would come up because I don’t intend to return to the homestead for the rest of my life, and I had a discussion with my therapist about it prior to my travels. I told her that I had spent my entire miserable, abusive childhood crying for help into a void, and that there was no laying bare of the scars on my body, mind, heart, or soul that had ever given anyone in my family pause. I asked her how much worse it would have had to be for any of them to care, to even listen, to stop repeating useless platitudes about forgiveness and the harm that holding onto hatred causes and think about just how monstrous things must have been for a child of eight years old to start having suicidal ideation. I asked her if it would have even made a difference if he had molested me, if that would have been evil enough for them to understand just how deep the damage goes … and she said “No.” In fact, she said, most of the time when that does happen, the family just covers it up and blames the victim for rocking the boat; and as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I had heard this before from many victims, but never has it been so visceral, so infuriating, so frustrating, as it was when depicted on screen in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. In the film’s opening moments, we see Shula (Susan Chardy) observe the dead body of her uncle in the road, and as she turns, we see a young Shula likewise stare impassively at his corpse. Thus begin the rites of the dead and the rituals of mourning, both of which attempt to sanitize the life of Uncle Fred, a lifelong and unrepentant pedophile, whose family has kept his danger a secret for so long that the trauma he has caused is intergenerational. Even in death, his sisters, who have a seven-year-old nephew via Fred’s currently still teenaged wife (she’s such a child that her smartphone case has sequined Mickey Mouse ears), blame the girl for failing to keep Fred fed and happy. “No family wants to admit that it’s dysfunctional,” my therapist told me months ago. “And more often than not they turn on the victim for complaining and protect the abuser. We don’t know why.” Every elder in Shula’s family has maintained a lie about Fred’s faith, fidelity, and goodness for so long that he never had to pay for his sins or his crimes in life, and even in death his victims aren’t free. A very, very strong showing that left me burning with righteous fury. Read Brandon’s review here.

3. Bring Her Back

My overall apathetic reaction to Danny and Michael Philippou’s freshman feature Talk to Me (which I mentioned at the top of my review for Bring Her Back) meant that I was interested but not overly invested in their sophomore outing. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional ride that this film took me on, with such palpable and almost unwatchable violence (it’s got the worst tooth/mouth gore I’ve seen all year, topping even the borderline nauseating tooth removal in No Other Choice). Sally Hawkins gives a star turn as a monstrously abusive foster mother hiding a secret agenda, one that we can empathize with even as we are stricken ill by the lengths that she will go to in order to try and bring back the daughter that she has lost. Not to be missed. 

2. The Phoenician Scheme

To allay any confusion, let it be known that although we are very pro-Wes Anderson around here, we are not shills. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Isle of Dogs, and I was lukewarm at best about The French Dispatch (Brandon responded quite well to it). I was all in on Asteroid City, though, and I find myself once again delighted by Mr. Anderson’s most recent release. Read my review here.

1. Universal Language

I was a latecomer to Universal Language, only managing to see it within the last month of the year, but it skyrocketed to being my top film of the year within just a few minutes. In trying to come up with a comparison point, I found myself reaching for some of the same touchstones that Brandon did in his review, including some of the visual stylings of Wes Anderson, the playful specialness of True Stories, and the sense of humor and historical revisionism (as well as the utter Candadianity) of Guy Maddin. Because of the various ways that the interconnected narratives wove together and then separated before colliding with another character’s storyline, I would best describe this as Maddin’s Magnolia. Just like P.T. Anderson’s film, it stays within the realm of the plausible (if quirky) until it goes for broke in its final moments; for Magnolia, that meant a one-off musical number and a rain of frogs, but for Universal Language, there’s a full-on personality crisis (get it while it’s hot!) and identity confusion, which makes for a somber and provocative ending to a movie that I couldn’t stop laughing with for most of its run time. Fantastic. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

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