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THE BEST MOVIES OF 2025 SO FAR
Welcome to the official halfway mark of a moviegoing year that’s already given us a handful of surprises, a few solid works from reliable auteurs, some really strong documentaries and not one but two Michael B. Jordans shooting Tommy guns and sending vampires back to hell. Despite the abundance of franchise sequels and a few big disappointments, it’s already shaping up to be a good 2025 for film lovers, with a lot of really strong stuff from the festival circuit heading your way in 2025’s back half. (Keep an eye out for Train Dreams, Nouvelle Vague, Sentimental Value and It Was Just an Accident, coming soon to a theater near before New Year’s Day.)
From a gamer-friendly Shakespeare production to a star-studded Wes Anderson comedy, a sexed-up spy vs. spy thriller to a double shot of uncut Canadian-cinema bliss, these 12 movies represent the high points of the year of to date. (And extra shout-outs to Best Wishes to All, Chaos: The Manson Murders, F1, I’m Still Here, Materialists, Misercordia, Presence, Sly Lives!, The Shrouds, and 28 Years Later…)
‘Black Bag’
Steven Soderbergh’s take on love, marriage and espionage plays like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as written by John le Carré, as fellow spies/spouses Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett navigate a precarious situation involving a double agent in their organization. He’s been tasked with finding out who might behind the sale of classified information; she’s the prime suspect. From there, it gets complicated. Yet the sheer fun that the filmmaker, his leads and their co-stars — Pierce Brosnan, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Industry‘s Marisa Abel — are having as they both indulge in an old-school spy-vs.-spy thriller and use it as a metaphor for faith, trust and power struggles in relationships is contagious. You want movie-star glamour and a smart deconstruction of a genre? It’s all in the bag.
‘Caught by the Tides’
Sifting through old footage during the pandemic, Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke (Unknown Pleasures, Still Life) came up with the idea of using outtakes and scenes from his previous films — all of which featured his longtime actors Tao Zhao and Zhubin Li — to craft something new. For a while, you ride shotgun through a stream-of-conscious tour through the nation’s cities and rural provinces, complete with corporate-sponsored pageantry and personal strife. It’s only when you get to the final third of the movie that Jia drops the hammer, and you suddenly realize that what felt like a free-form slideshow of China’s prosperity in the early 21st century has been carefully crafted to break your heart.
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