2025 Top Ten List

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

F1 (Joseph Kosinski)

The Wedding Banquet (Andrew Ahn)

The Actor (Duke Johnson)

The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)

Final Destination Bloodlines (Adam Stein & Zach Lipovsky)

Materialists (Celine Song)

Additional 2024 Films By Rating

How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois)

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle)

Henry Johnson (David Mamet)

What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sangsoo)

The History of Sound (Oliver Hermanus)

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho)

Chaos: The Manson Murders (Errol Morris)

Eddington (Ari Aster)

Jurassic World Rebirth (Gareth Edwards)

Rather than dramatically “unveiling” a top ten list sometime in January (as if anybody who reads this site didn’t already know what it was gonna look like), I revise the sucker as I go along. Here is what my list would look like if (god forbid) I were forced to make it today.

For archival purposes, I file everything by the year it had its world premiere. Many of these films will have been commercially released in the U.S. a year or two later, so my lists won’t always match up with other folks’ lists.

Ratings are on a needlessly precise 100-point scale.

Films I haven’t yet rated on that scale are marked with if I currently think they belong in my top ten. These films are subject to being shifted around or yanked altogether at any moment, after I revisit them and they get a numeral. If a film isn’t currently in my top ten, and I haven’t yet rated it, it ain’t here. There are a whole lot of those — if you’re wondering whether or not I’ve seen the masterpiece you can’t believe I omitted, check my master list.