The Best Movies of 2025: A Plex Year in Review

We watched several films in 2025, and the year handed us a rare gift. The same picture won at the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, LAFCA, the Sight and Sound poll, and the Academy Awards. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another earned those titles, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners came close enough that we understand the critics who flipped the order. Below it were three international films capable of headlining a quieter year, a horror slate that earned its place in the conversation, and an animated Netflix release no one saw coming.

See our List HERE of the best movies of 2025

The Year the Critics and the Academy Agreed

The film of 2025 is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. Six trophies at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026, including Best Picture and Best Director, settled the question. The same picture had already finished at the top of the National Board of Review list, the New York Film Critics Circle ballot, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association vote, the AFI Top 10, the Sight and Sound poll, and the IndieWire critics survey, so the Academy result confirmed a consensus that had already formed across two months of December and January voting.

The runner-up is interesting. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners sat one rank below One Battle After Another on the Sight and Sound ballot, and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times put Sinners first. Several other critics agreed with her flip. The Coogler picture won Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay for Coogler, and the year’s most discussed Cinematography trophy for Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman and the first Black person to win that category. In a different year, Sinners is the consensus pick. The fact that 2025 had two pictures of that tier is the year’s first useful piece of information about itself.

The second is that the quality at the top traveled outside the United States as cleanly as it traveled within. Jafar Panahi made It Was Just an Accident without official Iranian permission, took it to Cannes, and won the Palme d’Or. Joachim Trier moved Sentimental Value from the Cannes Grand Prix to the Best International Feature Oscar without losing critical altitude. Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent put Brazil into the Best Motion Picture, Drama race at the Golden Globes for the first time in the country’s history. Three international films in a single calendar year sat at the top of the conversation, and any one of them could have headlined a quieter cycle alone.

Underneath that top tier, horror filled the Best Picture conversation in a way it almost never does, animation set the year’s commercial ceiling, and the prestige slate leaned literary. Adaptations from Maggie O’Farrell, Denis Johnson, Mary Shelley, and Thomas Pynchon all made the Best Picture cut alongside an A24 sports drama about a 1950s table-tennis player. The middle of the studio market thinned. The top of it did not.

The Case for One Battle After Another

The simplest answer is that no single voting body had to carry it. Anderson’s film won at every layer of the year-end ballot system that matters, which is a different result from a coronation race.

The Academy gave it Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (Anderson’s first Oscar after a long career of nominations), Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn, his third), Best Film Editing, and the inaugural Best Casting Oscar. Six trophies in total, the most of the night.

The U.S. critics groups confirmed the picture across three different cities and methodologies:

• National Board of Review: Best Film, plus Best Director (Anderson) and Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio).
• New York Film Critics Circle: Best Film, plus Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro).
• Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Performance (Teyana Taylor).
• AFI: included on the Top 10.

The international polls did the same work. The Sight and Sound critics survey, voted on by more than 100 international critics through the British Film Institute’s annual ballot, ranked the picture at No. 1. The IndieWire poll of 148 critics confirmed the order.

The 83rd Golden Globe Awards in January 2026 produced the only major split. Hamnet took Best Motion Picture, Drama, while One Battle After Another took Musical or Comedy and three additional Globes, including Best Director and Best Screenplay. That kind of split is normal for years with two strong contenders, and it did not derail the consensus that formed around Anderson’s film through the rest of awards season.

What the spread tells you is that voters were reading the picture as a piece of construction. Six Oscars across writing, directing, editing, casting, supporting acting, and Best Picture is not a win that rests on a dominant lead performance. The Best Actor race went to Sinners. The Best Actress race went to Hamnet. Anderson’s film won the categories that recognize the shape of a film as a whole object, which is the configuration most likely to produce a durable Best Picture win in retrospect.

The Counter-Case for Sinners

Coogler did not make a horror movie that critics happened to like. He wrote and directed an original vampire-blues period piece set in 1932 Mississippi, with Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers running a juke joint. The script came first, the horror second. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography made the third argument, and the Academy rewarded all three.

The film opened in April 2025 with a $48 million debut, the biggest opening for an original film since 2019, and finished its theatrical run at $338.8 million worldwide. Audiences gave it an “A” CinemaScore, which is a grade horror films almost never see at the door, since horror audiences usually mark the genre’s discomfort downward as they leave the theater. The Sinners audience went the other direction.

What carried the picture into the Best Picture conversation was the way it was made. The script was an original, with no source novel and no franchise position behind it. Jordan plays both leads, and the editing has to keep two characters distinct in the same frame for nearly the entire runtime. Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and the first Black person to win the Cinematography Oscar, on a picture whose visual structure was the year’s most discussed.

Manohla Dargis at the New York Times ranked Sinners her No. 1 of the year, ahead of One Battle After Another at No. 2. She is not the only critic who flipped the consensus order, but she is the most prominent. The argument is that Sinners is doing a harder version of the same thing Anderson’s film does. It is an authored work in a genre that rarely gets authored work, and its formal control sits inside a commercial picture that audiences actually showed up for.

The Academy split the trophies cleanly between the two films. Anderson took the top-line categories. Coogler took lead actor, original screenplay, and cinematography, with a fourth in the craft section. Both films were treated as Best Picture-tier objects on the night, which is roughly how the year reads in retrospect.

The Year’s Best International Films

Three international pictures defined 2025 outside the U.S. prestige system, and each one would have headlined a quieter year on its own.

Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 2025. The Iran/France/Luxembourg co-production was made without official Iranian government permission, which is the working condition Panahi has filmed under for more than a decade after his 2010 sentencing in Tehran. The picture went on to a clean U.S. critics’ run, with the IndieWire poll placing it at No. 2, the Sight and Sound ballot inside the year’s top six, AFI handing it a Special Award, and NYFCC naming Panahi Best Director.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was Norway’s official Oscar submission. It took the Cannes Grand Prix in May and held its critical reputation across the long calendar from then to March 2026, when the 98th Academy Awards handed it Best International Feature. The film also slotted into the 10-film Best Picture nominee list, which confirmed it was functioning as a Best Picture-tier object inside the American awards system rather than only inside the international category. Trier’s career has been building toward this kind of crossover for 15 years, across films like Reprise, Oslo, August 31st, Louder Than Bombs, and The Worst Person in the World. Sentimental Value delivered the result those earlier pictures had been moving toward.

Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent made the most decorated festival run of the three. The film won Best Director and Best Actor (Wagner Moura) at Cannes plus the FIPRESCI Prize. At the 83rd Golden Globes in January 2026, the picture became the first Brazilian feature ever nominated for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and won Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor, Drama for Moura. Brazilian cinema had been a regular presence at the Globes’ Foreign Language category for decades, but the move into the main Drama race was a structural first. The 98th Academy Awards Best Picture slate also included the picture as one of the 10 nominees.

When three international films can each carry a year, that is the year, not the films.

The Rest of the Best Picture Slate

Beyond One Battle After Another, Sinners, The Secret Agent, and Sentimental Value, the 98th Academy Awards Best Picture nominees were Bugonia, F1, Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and Train Dreams. Six pictures, each functioning at a different point in the prestige system.

Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet took Best Motion Picture, Drama at the Golden Globes and Best Actress for Jessie Buckley at the Academy Awards. Buckley played Agnes Shakespeare in the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. Paul Mescal played Shakespeare. The film’s prestige run was the year’s most visible argument that traditional literary adaptation still has a place inside the Best Picture conversation.

Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which opened on Christmas Day, became A24’s highest-grossing release at $192 million worldwide. Timothee Chalamet played a 1950s table-tennis player and won the Globe and the Critics’ Choice for Best Actor (Drama). The picture earned nine Oscar nominations and 11 BAFTA nominations, which is the rare double-digit awards profile for a sports drama with no franchise base.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, took four Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Actress for Emma Stone. Stone’s nomination was her sixth in roughly a decade, which keeps the Lanthimos-Stone collaboration line (now four films deep, with The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia) at the front of contemporary American prestige cinema.

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, based on Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella and starring Joel Edgerton, premiered at Sundance in January 2025 and held its critical reputation through its November Netflix release. The Best Picture nomination was the rare nod for a Sundance premiere that had stayed in critical conversation for a full year.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein won three Oscars, the second-highest haul of the night behind only Anderson’s six. Oscar Isaac played Victor and Jacob Elordi played the Creature. Del Toro had been working publicly toward a Frankenstein adaptation for more than 15 years, and the picture confirmed his gothic register in a form the Academy was ready to recognize.

Joseph Kosinski’s F1, the Apple Original Films picture starring Brad Pitt, became the highest-grossing original film of 2025 at over $605 million worldwide and gave Apple its first box-office hit. The Best Picture nomination was the structural surprise of the slate, in part because original action filmmaking at this scale had not been a regular Best Picture presence in years.

The slate’s distribution across studios is part of the story. Three Netflix releases. One A24 release at the studio’s all-time gross record. One Apple original at the global gross top tier. Three international productions inside or adjacent to the slate. The prestige system in 2025 was not concentrated in one or two studios’ release schedules, which is how the year’s Best Picture conversation stayed open across so many entries.

Horror as a 2025 Pillar

Horror produced the year’s Best Actor winner (Jordan in Sinners), the year’s Best Original Screenplay (Coogler for the same picture), an acting Oscar for Amy Madigan, the highest-rated Final Destination movie ever made, and the biggest worldwide grosser the Conjuring franchise has had. The case for Sinners sits in its own section above. The other three titles deserve their own short reading.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, from Warner Bros. in August, finished at $259.7 million worldwide, the third top-grossing horror film of the year. The supernatural mystery’s most decisive piece of business was Madigan’s performance, which won Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards. NYFCC had given her the same prize in December, and the Academy confirmed it.

Final Destination: Bloodlines reset the franchise’s ceiling on both sides of the ledger. Critics gave the picture the strongest reception any film in the series has had, and the worldwide gross of $317.8 million is the franchise’s all-time best. Long-running horror franchises usually lose critical support as they age, and Bloodlines moved the other direction.

The Conjuring: Last Rites finished at $499.2 million worldwide, the highest gross in the entire Conjuring universe and the year’s biggest horror release globally. The reception was workmanlike rather than rapturous, but the gross is the marker that matters.

Three of the four titles named here shipped from Warner Bros., which built its 2025 release schedule around horror as a primary commercial lane. The strategy paid off across awards, gross, and audience reception.

The Animation Year

The year’s two highest-grossing films both came from animation. Ne Zha 2, released in China, finished at roughly $2.2 billion worldwide and became the first animated film ever past $2 billion. Zootopia 2 finished at $1.870 billion worldwide and became Disney’s highest-grossing animated film, surpassing Frozen 2’s $1.45 billion mark.

The sharpest critical surprise came from a Sony Pictures Animation film made for Netflix. KPop Demon Hunters, co-directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, debuted on the platform in June 2025 and crossed 500 million views. Netflix released a sing-along theatrical version that earned roughly $18 million in its first U.S. weekend, which made Netflix the first streaming-first studio to top the U.S. box office on a weekend. The picture took Best Animated Feature at both the Globes and the Oscars, and “Golden” won Best Original Song. The soundtrack became the first ever to land four simultaneous Top 10 entries on the Billboard Hot 100.

Pixar’s Elio underperformed commercially, which leaves the studio that defined modern American animation outside the year’s top tier on either the commercial or the critical side.

The Box Office Year

The U.S. domestic box office finished somewhere between $8.6 billion and $8.87 billion, the third post-pandemic year above $8 billion but short of the $9 billion analysts had penciled in. Admissions came in at roughly 780 million tickets, down 5% from 2024. Ticket-price inflation kept the dollar number above $8 billion, and the number of people in seats moved in the opposite direction.

The shape of the year was familiar, with a narrow set of tentpoles carrying the gross while the middle of the market thinned. F1 and Sinners were the two original films inside the top tier of the chart, which is the kind of result that does not happen in most modern theatrical years. The originals delivered.

The 24% to 27% gap below the 2018-2019 peak of $11.4 to $11.9 billion has held roughly steady across 2023, 2024, and 2025. The audience has stabilized at a new floor rather than drifting downward, which is the box-office year’s most important signal for the next cycle.

Six Films to Hand a Friend

If we had to press six pictures from 2025 into a friend’s hands and walk away, the list would look like this.

One Battle After Another is the obvious first pick. The argument is the spread of awards, which sits in its own section above.

Sinners is the second pick. The argument is the runner-up case made above plus the audience reading. The picture is the only horror film in over 35 years to receive an “A” CinemaScore.

It Was Just an Accident is the third. Panahi made the picture without Iranian government permission, took it to Cannes, and won the Palme d’Or. The political circumstances are real and worth knowing without becoming the reason to watch. The filmmaking is the reason.

Sentimental Value is the fourth. Trier’s Cannes Grand Prix winner took Best International Feature at the Academy Awards and is the European prestige picture of the year, with the cleanest line from Cannes recognition to Academy recognition.

KPop Demon Hunters is the fifth, and the year’s most unexpected critical success. The Sony Pictures Animation film for Netflix took Best Animated Feature at the Oscars and the Globes, won Best Original Song, and produced the first soundtrack with four simultaneous Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 entries.

Marty Supreme is the sixth. A24’s biggest hit ever, with Chalamet at full Safdie wattage and a haul of nine Oscar nominations alongside eleven BAFTA nominations. The Christmas Day theatrical release also proved the indies can still book a major holiday window at scale.

A reasonable seventh pick would be Frankenstein on the strength of del Toro’s three Oscars. A reasonable eighth would be Hamnet on the Drama Globe and Buckley’s lead actress trophy. The year produced enough strong work that the list could go to ten without losing quality.

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